towards a list etc.

[Venkatraman Iyer]

Digital on-line  vs. old print technology
------------------------------------------

Professors insisting on old print media publishings
with restrictions (explicit and implicit),
can see the Internet revolution providing
info at a click away and, "democratization"
at work.

-------------------------------------

Taken from: Nov 2000 issue of Digital Library (D-lib)
magazine
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november00/11inbrief.html

UC Berkeley Professors Measure Exploding World Production
of New Information

Two University of California, Berkeley, professors have
just finished analyzing all new data produced worldwide
last year -- on the Internet, in scholarly journals, even
in junk mail -- and report not just staggering totals,
but a "revolution" in information production and
accessibility.

In their report, "How Much Information?" professors
Hal Varian and Peter Lyman of the UC Berkeley School of
Information Management & Systems (SIMS) report new
information production in terms of paper, film, optical
and magnetic data. They analyzed industry and government
reports for production of information that also includes
e-mail, digital production, videos, DVDs, CDs, broadcast
outlets, photographs, books and newspapers.

[...]

The professors said they were struck by three emerging
trends.

One is "the 'democratization of data," the vast amount
of unique information stored and also created by
individuals. Original documents created by office workers
represent nearly 90 percent of all original paper
documents, while 56 percent of magnetic storage is in
single-user desktop computers.

"A century ago, the average person could only create
and access a small amount of information," wrote Varian
and Lyman in their report. "Now, ordinary people not only
have access to huge amounts of data, but are also able to
create gigabytes of data themselves and, potentially,
publish it to the world via the Internet."

The second surprise for the professors was the finding
that print accounts for such a miniscule amount of the
total information storage. But they said it doesn't mean
print is dead, rather it is a very efficient and
concentrated form for the communication of information.

The third striking finding for them was the dominance of
digital information and its phenomenal growth. This further
feeds the democratization of data, they said, because
digital information is potentially accessible anywhere
on the Internet and is a "universal" medium because it
can copy from any other format.

The latest report is not in printed form, because its
authors see it as a "living" document. It can be found at
<http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info/index.html>

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