The TFAO Digital Library
Content and paper-printed book equivalence
The Traditional Fine Arts Organization (TFAO) website, described at About TFAO, is the world's most visited site devoted to American art and the most informative online resource concerning American representational art. Every day, thousands of individuals including students, scholars, teachers and others view educational and informational materials on TFAO's site, which is structured as a digital library.
TFAO content by type
National Calendar of Art Exhibitions
Resource Library TFAO's Resource Library publication is the largest component of TFAO's website.
Projects, Reports and Studies
2015 content metrics
A file inventory of the TFAO Digital Library in January, 2015 indicated that the TFAO website contained:
Comparative analysis based on 2009 TFAO website metrics
Paper-printed book equivalence as of 2009
According to an undated lecture outline for SIMS 202:Information Organization and Retrieval, presented by Ray Larson and Marti Hearst of the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California-Berkeley, one sheet of paper holds 5KB and a typical book contains 1 MB of information. This equates to a 200 page book. According to a January 2003 article in +Plus magazine titled "Text, Bytes and Videotape" by Oliver Johnson, a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, "A page of a book (with 50 characters per line, 50 lines per page) takes 2,500 bytes, so a 400 page book takes 1,000,000 bytes." Mark Kochanski of the Computing and Software Systems department at University of Washington-Bothell states that there are 300 pages in an average book using 1MB, suggesting about 3.33 KB per page. A fourth estimate by another researcher was .5MB per book.
With the entire TFAO file size at 1,180MB (1.18GB): if an average TFAO-dl .jpg image contains 42KB,  then 20,640 images take about 864MB of disc storage. 1,180MB - 864MB = 316MB remaining for text. Assuming 1MB per paper-printed equivalent book, the book content of TFAO-dl is estimated at 316 books [316MB / 1MB per book = 316 books] plus about 65 images per book [20,640 images / 316 books = 65 images per book]. This TFAO estimate is derived by 20,640 total images with 4,464 cm series images with 540.9MB @ 121KB per file and the remainder 16,176 images comprised of am series and other miscellaneous images @ 20KB per file = 323.5MB. 323.5MB + 540.9MB = 864.4MB / 20,640 = 41.88KB, or say, 42KB per image.
Many TFAO-dl text pages are equivalent to numerous pages in a paper-printed publication due to the ability of Web readers to scroll down Resource Library pages of various lengths. Assuming 300 pages per average book @ 1MB per book, 316 books x 300 average paper pages per book = 94,800 equivalent book pages, divided by 7,450 text .htm pages equals an estimated 13 paper pages per TFAO-dl page.
Reducing the book size to resemble more closely the size of hypothetical paper-printed art publications:
Additive resource contribution provided by direct links to other content on the Web as of 2009
Since the TFAO library is digital, direct links to other Web content from the TFAO site may be considered in estimating the total paper-printed equivalent content. There are two parts of the TFAO site which contain material quantities of external links: Catalogues and Resource Library. Following are rough estimates, as of 2009, of external links for each catalog containing numerous links:
Total links from catalogues: 4,500
Links from Resource Library articles and essays = 7,000 files x 1 link per text file = 7,000
Combined total: 11,500
Assume content in linked files equal to TFAO content in its files:
7,450 TFAO + 11,500 other Web files = 18,950 combined files
18,950 / 7,450 = 2.54 multiplier
2.54 x 316 books in TFAO collection = 802 books, 3,208 equivalent magazine issues, 1,604 equivalent exhibition catalogues
Individual pages in this study will be amended as TFAO adds content, corrects errors and reorganizes sections for improved readability. Refreshing or reloading pages enables readers to view the latest updates.
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