NASA and Internet Archive Team to Digitize Space Imagery

Aug. 23, 2007

Bob Jacobs
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
bob.jacobs@xxxxxxxx

Paul Hickman
Internet Archive
415-462-1509, 415-561-6767
paul@xxxxxxxxxxx

RELEASE: 07-178

NASA AND INTERNET ARCHIVE TEAM TO DIGITIZE SPACE IMAGERY

WASHINGTON - 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 using no NASA funds.

"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.

The imagery archive also may include other historically significant
material such as audio files, printed documents and computer
presentations.

For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

For more information about Internet Archive, visit:

http://www.archive.org


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