Libraries of email adding up

All those emails - junk or otherwise - are adding up.

In 2002, people around the globe created enough new information to fill 500,000 United States Libraries of Congress, according to a study by faculty and students at the University of California at Berkeley.

The 5 billion gigabytes of new data works out to about 800 megabytes a person - the equivalent of a stack of books 9m high - the study by the university's School of Information Management and Systems found.

That's a 30 per cent increase in stored information from 1999, the last time the global study was conducted.