n., pl. linear feeta measurement of 12 inchesRussell 1939, 174The size is shown by giving the length in linear feet and inches of the space which the series would occupy if it were set up in the way books are shelved.Dowling 1975b, 426Included are 530 volumes of accounting records (1816–1926); 620 volumes of letterbooks (1844–1914); and 450 linear feet of letters concerning engineering and operations.O’Toole 1994, 649The Canadian employment records, surely unique aggregations of documents, were accumulating at the rate of 100,000 linear feet every year.Weideman 2006, 281When the calculations were in, we spent slightly more than 2.5 hours per linear foot to process the collection.Dickson 2010, 631The project manager and research assistant spent more than 450 hours over the course of 9 months to conduct this copyright investigation. The total cost of the research was approximately $8,000, or just over $1,050 per linear foot of correspondence.Altermatt and Hilton 2012, 171In May 2009, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the Tamiment Library at New York University a grant to process its 650-linear-foot “hidden collection” of printed ephemera.Beinecke Library 2021The estimated hours per linear foot reflect an assumed standard of a file- and item-level of processing, and can be adjusted downward for less granular levels of processing.
Notes
In archives, linear feet are often used to measure shelf space or film footage.
