OBITUARIES - Peter Lyman, 66; UC Berkeley professor studied data overload

Peter Lyman, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley's School of Information who was known for his research on online information and social networks on the Internet, has died. He was 66.

Lyman, who also was a former USC and UC Berkeley university librarian, died of brain cancer Monday at his home in Berkeley, university officials said.

For those who feel overburdened by information overload, research conducted by a team led by Lyman and fellow UC Berkeley School of Information professor Hal Varian discovered some staggering numbers a few years ago to show why.

According to their widely cited study "How Much Information?," worldwide information production increased at an average rate of 30% each year from 1999 to 2002.

The amount of new information stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media doubled during those three years, the researchers reported. And, they said, if the supply of new material saved in 2002 alone were converted to print, it would fill half a million libraries the size of the Library of Congress.

"All of a sudden, almost every aspect of life around the world is being recorded and stored in some information format," Lyman said in 2003. "That's a real change in our human ecology."

The intent of their study, Lyman told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2004, "was to quantify people's feelings of being overwhelmed by information and to look at trends. People had no sense of why this was happening or where the growth was."

In just one scientific field -- global climate data -- the volume of recorded information was expected to skyrocket from 2 billion gigabytes in 2000 to 15 billion gigabytes in 2010.

Lyman presented the last update of the study, which was supported by Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and EMC Corp., at an information storage conference in Orlando, Fla., in late 2003.

Among the study's findings:

* Some 92% of new information is stored in magnetic media, primarily hard drives.

* Although original information on paper continues to grow, most comes in the form of office documents and mail -- not books, newspapers or journals.

* The U.S. produced about 40% of the world's new stored information.

"This study shows what an enormous challenge we and the rest of the information technology industry face in organizing, summarizing and presenting the vast amount of information mankind is accumulating," Jim Gray, a Microsoft research scientist, said in 2003.