{"id":16077,"date":"2012-02-06T10:50:42","date_gmt":"2012-02-06T08:50:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/?p=16077"},"modified":"2012-02-06T10:50:42","modified_gmt":"2012-02-06T08:50:42","slug":"new-university-of-cyprus-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2012\/02\/06\/new-university-of-cyprus-library\/","title":{"rendered":"New University of Cyprus library"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Cyprus Mail reports<\/a> that the construction of the new University of Cyprus library has begun. \u00a0It will take a while, so the doors are expected to open some time in September, 2014. \u00a0While reading through the article, one particular paragraph took me a while to understand.<\/p>\n

The library\u2019s collection, which will be housed in an impressive dome-shaped building holding \u00a0around 600,000 books, more than 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books all in digital format plus 10,000 audio books and 150 databases. Its contents will be accessible to all Cypriots.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My first thought was that the library will hold 600,000 books in digital format and that the new building is being constructed to accommodate that storage. \u00a0I thought that was a bit excessive. \u00a0After all, I used to have an e-book library of more than a 1,000 titles and they were living nicely on a single hard disk. \u00a0Digital storage is cheap these days and the size of drives keep growing. \u00a0How much space does one need to store 600,000 books in digital form? – I thought.<\/p>\n

The size of books in my collection are somewhere between 500 kilobytes to a couple of megabytes. \u00a0Let’s assume 1 megabyte for an average book. \u00a0How much space is there on a modern hard drive? \u00a0I’ll assume 2 TB (terabytes). \u00a0How many average books can we store on such a disk? 2 TB \/ 1 MB = 2,000,000,000,000 \/ 1,000,000 = 2,000,000. \u00a0I know, I’m approximating things a lot with terabytes, megabytes, and average book sizes. \u00a0But with a single 2 TB disk holding 2,000,000 books, give or take, I don’t think a new building is in order. \u00a03 TB and 4 TB hard disks exist already. \u00a0By September 2014 we’ll probably have way more than that. \u00a0Even a few of those connected together for backups, “150 databases” and such will provide a lot of storage, while being the size of a device that is easy to hide at home. \u00a0New building? Really?<\/p>\n

Of course, once I re-read the paragraph a few times, I realized that I’m on a totally wrong foot here. \u00a0It read more like:<\/p>\n