I’m trying to gather data on the number of documents gathered in libraries and on the internet. I found a good LARC list for America’s libraries, Library of Congress is our biggest with 24 million+ docs.
Anyone know some others around the world?
Also, are there any figures on how many documents are on the www?
My university library has 9 million volumes. It’s big. (in 14 different buildings)
Jman
To contribute the one factoid I have on the subject:
The Harvard Law Library at, of all places, Harvard Law School, is the world’s largest academic law library. As of July 1, 2000, it held 2,038,218 volumes.
More fun facts, and even more boring facts about Harvard Law’s library can be found at http://www.law.harvard.edu/library/facts/facts_hls.htm
–Amy
Library of congress boasts 115 million docs, worlds largest
Russian State liberry claims 2nd largest in world, largest in europe, 41 million “units of storage”
Oxford claims 10 million books
French national, about 7 or 8 million volumes
Trinity College (ireland) blessed with one copy of every book published in the UK and Ireland since 1801 4 million volumes, 400 years old
Berlin central and regional liberry 2.3 million “medium units”
China’s natl. liberry 1.6 million threadbound books, 700 year old collection
Not data on Dutch or others
How about the Vatican library? I imagine it’s been getting books before almost any of those others existed… I’ve always wanted to visit, if only to find the vault of supressed knowledge… hehehehe
Cyveillance claims 2.1 billion “unique, publicly available” internet pages in july 2000 growing by about 7 million a day.
Anamorph.com stats generator claims 880,564,000-ish internet users as of tomorrow.
Any takers?
According to the Vatican’s own website http://www.vatican.va
The Vatican only collects materials in the humanities and to a lesser extent the social sciences.
If you want to go to see the suppressed information, you can visit the archives, which are officially known as “The Secret Archives” (Archivio Segreto Vaticano). However, you need a letter of introduction from some scholarly group to let you in.
A knowledge of Latin probably helps a lot.
Pope Leo XIII opened up the “Secret Archives” to the public.
New York Public Library: 14,000,000 volumes
British Museum Library: 7,000,000
The Dutch National (or Royal) Library is quite big as well, at least when you take the language into account: not that many people speak Dutch, of course. From their English website, it appears inpossible to gather any information on the size of the collection.
On the Dutch page, they state that there are over 900,000 volumes of Dutch publications in the library. This collection has been amassed since 1974, and does not encompass the older works in the Dutch language. The library has been in continuous existance since 1798, and the older collections combined add up to 200,000 volumes, roughly.
Since 1996, an electronic version of the archive is maintained as well. No info on the size, however.
I visited Trinity college in Dublin just a week ago. The library is simply stunning in its beauty.
bibliophage - Your figure for the British Library is way too low. (Calling it the British Museum Library is an obvious giveaway that the information is out of date.) The statistics given on the BL’s own webpage (http://www.bl.uk) are 16 million books and periodical volumes, 660,000 newspaper titles, 295,000 manuscripts, 260,000 India Office records, 8 million philatelic items, 4 million maps, 1.4 million music scores, 1.1 million sound discs, 184,000 sound tapes and 205,000 photographs housed on 360 miles of shelving [267 in London, 97 in Yorkshire].
Elsewhere, they claim that they have a total of 150 million items, but that is clearly using a different, much more elastic, definition. I suspect that the same is true for the claims that the Library of Congress has 115 million ‘documents’ or that the Russian State Library has 41 million ‘units of storage’. The lack of any defined unit of measurement makes precise comparisons difficult.