A rash of Library of Congress comparisons

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We have all heard “Library of Congress” (LOC) comparisons when it comes to storage. Companies far and wide that deal with large amounts of digital content or data always seem to be compared to the amount of data stored by the Library of Congress. I think we (Seagate) have even used such comparisons in the past…

I came across this great post by Leslie Johnston on The Signal blog on the LOC website: “How many Libraries of Congress does it take…?” Leslie’s post provides some examples of such comparisons. Here are a few of my favorites:

“Every Six Hours, the NSA Gathers as Much Data as Is Stored in the Entire Library of Congress.”
“Facebook’s photo collection has a staggering 140 billion photos, that’s over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress.”
“There are 25 Petabytes (10^15) created every day and thrown into the internet. This is 70 times larger than the Library of Congress.”
“The size of Facebook’s data retention database alone would be larger than all of the content that the Library of Congress has put online to date.”

It’s not surprising that Leslie’s post resulted in more examples of such comparisons, as well as questions as to how, when, what the Library of Congress counts/measures the size of their library. Check it out.

When was the last time you went to the library?

The land before drives: at the library