How Much Info?|Staley Library| Millikin University

Asking the important questions about information

Why learn research skills?

A 2000 study by the University of California at Berkeley found world information production was the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person each year! See: How Much Information?
In 2003 UCB repeated the study and found that 800 megabytes of new information per person was created in 2002 alone! See: How Much Information 2003.

Your job is important! Retrieving and evaluating the best possible information source is YOUR responsibility!

How much is a byte?

Byte [ 8 bits]

1 byte: a single character

Kilobyte [ 1,000 bytes ]

1 Kilobyte: A very short story

Megabyte [ 1,000,000 bytes]

1 Megabyte: A small novel OR a 3.5 inch floppy disk

5 Megabytes: The complete works of Shakespeare

Gigabyte [ 1,000,000,000 bytes]

1 Gigabyte: a pickup truck filled with paper OR a symphony in high-fidelity sound OR a movie at TV quality

Terabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000 bytes]

1 Terabyte: An automated tape robot OR all the X-ray films in a large technological hospital OR 50000 trees made into paper and printed

10 Terabytes: The printed collection of the US Library of Congress

Petabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes]

2 Petabytes: All US academic research libraries

200 Petabytes: All printed material OR production of digital magnetic tape in 1995

Exabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes]

Adapted from: Data powers of ten http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info/datapowers.html

Asking questions about information use:

Table 1: Worldwide production of original content, stored digitally using standard compression methods, in terabytes circa 1999.
Storage Medium	Type of Content	Growth Rate, %
Paper	Books	2
	Newspapers	-2
	Periodicals	2
	Office documents	2
	Subtotal:	2
Film	Photographs	5
	Cinema	3
	X-Rays	2
	Subtotal:	4
Optical	Music CDs	3
	Data CDs	2
	DVDs	100
	Subtotal:	70
Magnetic	Camcorder Tape	5
	PC Disk Drives	100
	Departmental Servers	100
	Enterprise Servers	100
	Subtotal:	55
TOTAL:		50

Adapted from: Journal of Electronic Publishing http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-02/lyman.html

Table 4: Summary of yearly media use by US households in hours per year, with estimated megabyte equivalent. (Hours from Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1999, Table 920, (projected)).
Item	1992 Hours	2000 Hours	% Change
TV	1510	1571	4
Radio	1150	1056	-8
Recorded Music	233	269	15
Newspaper	172	154	-10
Books	100	96	-4
Magazines	85	80	-6
Home video	42	55	30
Video games	19	43	126
Internet	2	43	2,050
Total:	3,324	3,380	1.7

Adapted from: Journal of Electronic Publishing http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-02/lyman.html

Findings of the 2003 study

The information below is extracted from the How Much Information? 2003 report from the University of California at Berkeley.

Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.
It is estimated that new stored information grew about 30% a year between 1999 and 2002.
The United States produces about 40% of the world's new stored information, including 33% of the world's new printed information, 30% of the world's new film titles, 40% of the world's information stored on optical media, and about 50% of the information stored on magnetic media.
The amount of information on paper is still increasing. Inhabitants of North America consume 11,916 sheets of paper each (24 reams).The World Wide Web contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface; in volume this is seventeen times the size of the Library of Congress print collections.
Instant messaging generates five billion messages a day (750GB), or 274 Terabytes a year.
E-mail generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.

The size of the Internet in terabytes.
Medium	2002 Terabytes
Surface Web	167
Deep Web	91,850
Email (originals)	440,606
Instant messaging	274
TOTAL	532,897