I have been number crunching figures regarding how many items the library purchased in the last financial year and have converted them into the following set of factoids which may be of interest.
We purchased 77,612 items for the libraries last financial year.
Now close your eyes and imagine that you are in the Eastern Regional Libraries Cheer Squad behind the goals at the MCG.
If you placed the 3585 CDs that we bought on top of each
other they would make a pile twice the height of two goal posts placed on top
of each other.
If you then decided to place all of the magazines that we purchased on top
of each other (11,295) they would reach as high as a light tower at the MCG
(75m in height - the equivalent of a 24 story building).
If you then placed all the DVDs we bought end to end
(10,985) they would stretch from the MCG all the way up to the front steps of
the State Library of Victoria (2.1 km).
And then if you were to place all of the books that we have
purchased this year (Fiction, Non-Fiction and Paperbacks = 33,990) in equal
piles in front of the State Library you would have 24 piles of books reaching
as high as the library's dome.
But what was even more amazing was the following calculation based on the items purchased for the eLibrary.
The eLibrary collection contains 7,636 eBooks and 1,607 audiobooks.
I was able to calculate an average for the file size of the
eBooks and audiobooks and then calculated that the total size of the eLibrary
equated to approximately 60,000,000 kilobytes......... which sounds pretty
impressive until you realise that 60,000,000 kilobytes equates to 60 gigabytes
or 0.06 terabytes.
Basically you would be able to store our entire eLibrary
collection on a 1TB portable hard drive from Dick Smiths and have room for
another 15 ERL eLibraries on it!
A 1TB portable hard drive is the same size as a normal
paperback book and costs $150.
Cheers, Paul.
