[Foundation-l] largest free content website

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 10:15 PM, Dominic McDevitt-Parks
<mcdevitd at gmail.com> wrote:

>>> On 8 July 2011 16:47, Samuel Klein<meta.sj at 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