> Tim, I believe that the figures you are working with reflect the public use
> of WorldCat. We do not know how much use is made by libraries/others with
> OCLC accounts, who are doing cataloging, or performing ILL transactions. My
> gut tells me that the vast majority of WorldCat use is behind that wall.
I suspect that much of it is behind the wall, but how much could that
really be? Leaving aside ILL, how much traffic goes back and forth?
Let's take the 241 million number. Lets multiply that by five to cover
re-loads and accessing of the data in other way. That's 2.4 billion
records moving. MARC records average about 1k. (I just ran a large
consortium and the average was 927 bytes, so I can be way off and
still right.)
That's 1,149 GB of data. That fits on a decent PC, without
compression. Over a year, that's 38k coming and going per second. (For
comparison, LibraryThing, which isn't a very popular website, moves
MBs per second.)
No matter how you work them, the numbers just don't add up to
anything. How many orders of magnitude do my calculations have to be
off in order for OCLC to be doing in a year the information processing
equivalent of a day's worth of people watching David at Dentist?
Tim
Received on Fri Aug 06 2010 - 15:02:06 EDT