http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-lyman7jul07
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OBITUARIES
Peter Lyman, 66; UC Berkeley professor studied data
overload
By Dennis McLellan, Times Staff Writer
July 7, 2007
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.
Varian said he and Lyman "never realized the study
would be so widely cited,
but it kind of caught the public's imagination."
"We did [the study] basically to get some summer jobs
for some of our
students; nobody had pulled all this information together in
one place,"
Varian told The Times on Friday.
Describing Lyman as "a wonderful colleague and
man," Varian said that "some
of his other work might be more long-lasting" than the
"How Much
Information?" study.
In 2005, Lyman became the director of the Digital Youth
Project, a
three-year study of how children use digital media in their
everyday lives.
The goal of the project, which was funded by the John D. and
Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation, is to improve children's learning
experiences and help
families and schools use digital media for education.
"Unfortunately," said Varian, "that work was
interrupted by his untimely
death."
Lyman was born in San Francisco in 1940. He earned a
bachelor's degree in
philosophy from Stanford University in 1962, a master's
degree in political
science from UC Berkeley in 1963 and a doctorate in
political science from
Stanford in 1972.
He was one of the founders of James Madison College, a
residential college
at Michigan State University with a public policy focus, and
was a faculty
member from 1967 to 1987, when he moved to USC.
At USC, he founded and served as executive director of the
Center for
Scholarly Technology, which established the university as a
leader in
library information systems. He also served as associate
dean for library
technology before being appointed university librarian in
1991, and he is
credited with leading USC's libraries into a new
technological era.
At UC Berkeley, he served as university librarian from 1994
to 1998. He also
became a professor in the school of Information Management
& Systems (now
the School of Information) in 1994 and served several years
as associate
dean of the School of Information. He became an emeritus
professor in 2006.
Lyman is survived by his wife, Barrie Thorne, a UC Berkeley
professor of
gender and women's studies and sociology; a son, Andrew
Thorne-Lyman; a
daughter, Abigail Thorne-Lyman; twin grandsons; and a
sister, Cynthia Lyman.
The School of Information is planning a campus memorial
service for early in
the fall semester.
--
dennis.mclellan latimes.com
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