On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 10:15 PM, Dominic McDevitt-Parks
<mcdevitd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8 July
2011 16:47, Samuel Klein<meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Right. NARA has 5 billion pages of PD content online, as I learned
>> this morning. Is it 'a website'?
>>
> Do you have a cite for that? Could probably be added to:
>
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons
Actually, I think the point that David Ferriero was making, to give you a
sense of the immensity of their digitization struggle, was that that is the
size of their *holdings*.Their digital collections are not even be in the
millions yet; the current official number is 153,000 (documents, so the page
count could still be much higher) digitized and described at the item-level
in the catalog, though there may be some thousands more not in the catalog
in online exhibits. They do, of course, have an increasing number of
born-digital documents as well. It's a huge undertaking. As I mentioned
earlier today, only 68% of the holdings of National Archives are even
cataloged, and many of these are not even item-level descriptions, so they
are not even at the point yet where they know everything they have. Some
statistics: <http://www.archives.gov/research/arc/about-arc.html>.
Aha, that's a handy stats page. So we aren't not totally dwarfed by
other online collections; maybe by a single order of magnitude by the
free-content book collections out there.
SJ