Behind-the-Scenes: OCLC’s WorldCat
Having used OCLC’s WorldCat (?) for my entire professional career I was pleased to see Roy’s post detailing a recent tour of the OCLC computing facilities. It is interesting to see how much physical space is required for mass storage and how those space demands have shrunk over the years. Roy goes on to describe the amount of data:
Bill Rogge, who is giving the tour, points out a long structure taller than us that holds a tape library for mass storage. And he means mass. How does ten Petabytes sound? Think you could store enough music and videos on that to keep your teenagers happy? For hard disk storage there is a relatively paltry 180 Terabytes, which is nonetheless still enough to keep your teenagers happy.
For those outside the library world, WorldCat can now be searched for free at http://www.worldcat.org.
