Unexpected statistic.
Feb. 20th, 2009 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsWe had a department meeting at work yesterday, and obviously while I can't talk about any specific internal details, we did get a fascinating insight into how our product is being used by a spin-off project between various libraries and the Google Books people.
One of the things the manager of the project said, though, was that "Prior to 1965, the largest interlibrary catalogs in the world were tracking at less than 500,000 published works. Right new we estimate the number of published works that a world-spanning library catalog has to track at approximately 20 million."
That's a huge, huge jump. But really, less than half a million published works between the introduction of writing and 1965? That sounded really low to me.
One of the things the manager of the project said, though, was that "Prior to 1965, the largest interlibrary catalogs in the world were tracking at less than 500,000 published works. Right new we estimate the number of published works that a world-spanning library catalog has to track at approximately 20 million."
That's a huge, huge jump. But really, less than half a million published works between the introduction of writing and 1965? That sounded really low to me.
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Date: 2009-02-20 09:08 pm (UTC)Addendum to #1--even electronic catalogs used to take up a huge amount of space, and it all had to be accessible. No tape libraries here! As an example, in the early 90s I worked at Cornell U, where the library catalog ran on NOTIS. NOTIS ran on an IBM 3090 mainframe* somewhat prosaically named cornellc.
*For those of you too young to have ever met one, the central complex of a 3090 was rather...substantial. I know people who have *living rooms* smaller than cornellc. Water-cooled, and the machine room had its own *generator*. The UPS systems were to hold things long enough for the generator to power up, and the generator was to allow the mainframes to shut down gracefully. During the frequent summer power outages we'd all troop outside and listen to the generator fire up. It was only slightly less loud than a jet engine.