NASA and Internet
Archive of San Francisco are partnering to scan, archive and manage the
agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video. The
imagery will be available through the Internet and free to the public,
historians, scholars, students and researchers.
Currently, NASA has more than 20 major imagery collections online. With
this partnership, those collections will be made available through a
single, searchable "one-stop-shop" archive of NASA imagery.
"Making NASA's important scientific and space exploration imagery
available and easily accessible online to all is a service of tremendous
value to America, and we're pleased to partner with the experts at Internet
Archive to accomplish this effort," said Robert Hopkins, chief of strategic
communications at NASA Headquarters, Washington.
NASA selected Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, as a partner
for digitizing and distributing agency imagery through a competitive
process. The two organizations are teaming through a non-exclusive Space
Act agreement to help NASA consolidate and digitize its imagery archives at
no cost to the agency.
"We're dedicated to making all human knowledge available in the digital
realm," said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of Internet
Archive. "The educational value of the images NASA has collected during the
course of its five decades of scientific discovery is unprecedented.
Digitizing NASA's imagery is a big step in Internet Archive's ongoing
efforts to digitize a vast spectrum of content and make it freely
accessible to the public in an easily searched online destination."
Under the terms of this five-year agreement, Internet Archive will
digitize, host and manage still, moving and computer-generated imagery
produced by NASA. In the first year, Internet Archive will consolidate
NASA's major imagery collections. In the second year, digital imagery will
be added to the archive. In the third year, NASA and Internet Archive will
identify analog imagery to be digitized and added to this online
collection.
In addition, Internet Archive will work with NASA to create a system
through which new imagery will be captured, catalogued and included in the
online archive automatically. To open this wealth of knowledge to people
worldwide, Internet Archive will provide free public access to the online
imagery, including downloads and search tools.
Source: NASA
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