Miles and miles of archives

But how do they measure it?

Have you ever been on a tour of a historic building or library and the guide says something like, “Our archives contain 100 miles of information”?

Eh? What? This is the sort of thing that sends my brain into overdrive, because what does this ‘fact’ actually mean? How has this measurement been calculated?

They are clearly not talking about how much shelf space is taken up because judging by the size of the building and the length of the shelves that couldn’t be possible.

Let’s assume, reading across the shelves left to right, that they mean the total width of every page in every book, every leaflet, every receipt, as if they were laid side by side (doubled to include the flip side).

Or, better still, the total length of all the pages, which I think is more logical. Then it’s a case of multiplying the amount of pages by the height –120 pages x 8 inches for one book + 216 pages x 10 inches for the next one, etc etc. I’m sticking with imperial measurements here to tally up with the miles.

Ah, all well and good, but do they, should they, include both sides of every sheet, plus book covers, fly sheets and any blank pages? Hmmm… Surely, therefore, they should only be measuring the length of only the printed or written information?

But that raises further questions (is it just me?!) because the calculation would only make sense if all the information within all the archived material was set in the same size. For instance, three pages of solid text, set in 9pt on A4 with narrow margins, contain far more information and takes much longer to read than, say, twenty pages of short poems in a small hardback or as handwritten notes.

I’d like to think that the people who come up with these impressive numbers are using some kind of calibration or algorithm to devise this total length after digitising all those pages and doing a word count. I doubt it though.

Thoughts?