19 Feb
2008
19 Feb
'08
5:51 p.m.
Jesse wrote:
the MySQL database is 184 MiB for our catalog of roughly 13,000 books and 2,000 patrons.
Back in the pre-history of library automation (the 1980s), when space was tight and disks expensive, we used to estimate the size of a bibliographic database at 768 bytes per MARC record. I suspect that rounding up to 1 MB/ bib record is probably still a good guess. That's for the generic "title level" description, not including information about all the copies of a title. Don't forget to allow for annual growth, and extra room for abstracts or lengthy notes (e.g. for archival items or rare books), and for local holdings information, especially if you record journal issues. Chris Brown-Syed