How many Terrabytes to digitise a library?

whitegoods_engineer

I was discussing how big hard drives have become with somebody very non-techie, and was trying to explain how big hard drives have become over the years.

I said something along the lines of 'a 2 TB drive could probably store all of the local library's books'

Now I know bitmaps and page scans are much more bit-intensive than ascii character based storage, and photos and pictures take much more memory, but does anybody know if I'm right?

Again, we can all talk about the number of books in a particular library branch, but let's just say an average mediun sized public library.

Would a 2TB drive hold the contents of a library?

jaydeeuk1

I'd say yes, easily.

dogmaryxx

A gigabyte (GB) is 1,024 MB. That’s equivalent to 10 yards of books standing side by side

The Terabyte = 1,024 Gigabytes .

You do the maths.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/memory-sizes-gigabytes-terabytes-petabytes/

epninety

Good coffee break question!

Answer : Probably!

Start by assuming all books are plain text, no images, in English. Also assume I got my sums right

Amazon seem to reckon the average book is 64000 words
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/book-length_n_1334636.html)

Average English word is something over 5 letters, include one more for punctuation and spaces (since we will store in ascii).

The British Library says : "The collection includes well over 150 million items, in most known languages"

If we assume they are all books, in English, or at least the latin alphabet, then that's a total of around 6 x 10^13 bytes. Shove the whole lot through WinZip and it'll come out to more like 4.2 x 10^13 bytes. So that's just shy of 40TB

Won't fit on your 2TB HDD, but it's not beyond what could be stored in a smallish server rack.

On the other hand, Durham council (first example I found), says their libraries have three quarters of a million books available for reader. So that's only about 200GB, you won't even need to clear off your 'photography' collection first

As soon as you go away from highly efficient storage like ASCII, then it's gets more difficult - not difficult to estimate as such, but difficult to says what's acceptable, because scanning images and diagrams etc. is always 'lossy' to some extent, so it becomes a trade between quality and size.

I_have_spoken

Good coffee break question!

Here's another. How much would it cost to purchase one of every item in the Argos catalogue?

epninety

Every one, or only the ones I'd want to own?

Everything in the catalogue should be easy enough to work out. IIRC Argos has order codes of predictable form, so you could ping their website with every possible order code and screenscrape the prices.

Off you go :rotfl:

googler

epninety wrote: »

Every one, or only the ones I'd want to own?

Everything in the catalogue should be easy enough to work out. IIRC Argos has order codes of predictable form, so you could ping their website with every possible order code and screenscrape the prices.

Off you go :rotfl:

Or you could bung a tenner and a pint at a friend in Argos' IT department (maybe a few rupees and a lassi, come to that....), and ask them to run a batch job or query against the database.....

Big_Graeme

epninety wrote: »

On the other hand, Durham council (first example I found), says their libraries have three quarters of a million books available for reader. So that's only about 200GB, you won't even need to clear off your 'photography' collection first

But does that include multiple copies of the same book?
My 'photography' collection is archived and stored well, it needs a erm little space ;-)