In the next five years, NASA's archives of manned and unmanned space missions, a 50-year collection of photos, videos, films and other material, is about to be put online into a central searchable archive by the non-profit, San Francisco-based Internet Archive. The effort will be paid for solely through grants, foundations and individual contributions received by the Internet Archive. NASA already has much of its collection online, but the material is divided up into more than 20 different imagery categories, making it hard to find specific images or archives unless a user knows exactly where it is.
Paul Hickman, office manager for the Internet Archive, said the group will house the digitized collection on its high-capacity redundant servers in San Francisco, Europe and Egypt. Presently, the group handles an estimated 5 petabytes of storage, but more capacity can be added. The images and other data will likely be provided to the Internet Archive on hard drives so that it can be transferred to the group's archives for storage, Hickman said. Other materials, including printed documents, microfilm, books, computer presentations, audio files and VHS video, will be scanned or copied and then digitized for the online archive.
News source: ComputerWorld