Stored Data Doubles in Three Years

You might have seen this story making its way around the Internet last week. On one hand, it's kind of hard to believe but on the other hand, considering the growth of the Web, not difficult at all: according to the How Much Information 2003 study ( http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/ ), "Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002." What is an exabyte? "..." the nineteen million books and other print collections in the Library of Congress would contain about ten terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections."

Blfuhgsgf! It seems almost impossible that this much new information could be created, but when you think of the Web, and its over 3 billion Web pages, and the fact that search engines index only a fraction of available Web pages, it doesn't seem so unlikely after all.

At one point, the *generation* of meaningful information was the limited commodity. After that, the access to meaningful information was the limited commodity. Now it seems that the skill needed for this new world -- the world of five exabytes a year -- is thoughful evaluation and consumption, meaningful aggregation, and the uniquely, wonderfully human ability to make huge leaps between disparate collections of data and create new things, draw new conclusions, and generate new ideas. Librarians and other information professionals, you're more important than ever!

Posted to Reference