Digitizing 100 Years of Astronomical Data

Maximum Prophet writes to mention that a collection of glass plates containing astronomical information from the late 19th century through the mid-1980s is being considered for digitization. "The accumulated result weighs heavily on its keepers on Observatory Hill, just up Garden Street from Harvard Square: more than half a million images constituting humanity's only record of a century's worth of sky. 'Besides being 25 percent of the world's total of astronomical photographic plates, this is the only collection that covers both hemispheres,' said Alison Doane, curator of a glass database occupying three floors, two of them subterranean, connected by corkscrew stairs. It weighs 165 tons and contains more than a petabyte of data. The scary thing is that there is no backup." I'm sure that anyone with a spare $5 million or so would be welcomed with open arms.

Comments

Glass plates will outlive the digital"backup"

[gatkinso]

now there is some irony.

Re:Glass plates will outlive the digital"backup"

[KokorHekkus]

now there is some irony.

But currently they also makes them vulnerable to a single point of failure (as indirectly pointed out in the article). If you have some data that has any real value for you then having only one copy (or only one storage facility) isn't any real protection whatever method you use. In this case we have data that would be readily accepted for backup by organisations all around the globe and barring a worldwide upheaval the safety of the data would be much better than any single glassplate could offer.

Of course the ideal would be if we could develop a cheap digital permanent storage that had guaranteed physical longevity, say several millenia. That combination would allow easy dissemination of the data and safety by using a multiplicty of sources.

Re:Glass plates will outlive the digital"backup"

[Cecil]

Ever tried to maintain archival backups for a petabyte-worth of data?

Yes, as a matter of fact. Definitely a lot of work is involved, but do you believe that you wouldn't need a team of document managers, millions of dollars worth of floor space, and expensive climate controlled facilities for archival of microfiche? You most certainly do. It's a lot of data. Period. No matter what you try to do with it, it's a lot of data. It's going to require a lot of resources. That's just a fact of life.

Anyway, noone in their right mind would choose microfiche for that type of data. If you're only storing plain text pages it's adequate (though I still don't think it would be the "right way to do it" in this day and age), but for photographic plates? Not going to work.

Microfiche is vastly overrated, in my opinion. My current project involves taking 2 floors worth of 30-50 year old microfiche and scanning it, OCRing it, and PDFing it. Yes it certainly does age. Quite poorly, in fact. The quality is absolutely terrible compared to the paper versions, some of it is stuck together, and indexing and cataloging it is a nightmare all of its own.

Yes, there are challenges in the digital world too, but most are easily surmountable given a little bit of common sense in understanding that digital is not magic. It doesn't mean you can "fire and forget". The documents will still require maintenance, cataloging, protection and monitoring. Format obsolescence is very nearly a nonissue, it is blown way out of proportion. That's where the "maintenance" comes in. The key benefit of digital is that you can and should losslessly upgrade your format whenever obsolescence is becoming a concern. Formats do not disappear overnight and suddenly everyone forgets what to do with them, you have plenty of time to make your transition if you're paying attention (which you must be: again, digital is not magic).

Google

[blhack]

I'm sure that a company like google would be MORE than willing to fund a project archiving these. The positive press, proliferation of their intended "do no evil/good guy/just another bunch of geeks" image, having their name on a major scientific project would easily be worth the investment.

Re:InfiniBytes

[modecx]

here is a practically infinite amount of data on each of those plates, limited by our precision in measuring them.

And limited by the lenses/mirrors, and limited by atmospheric effects, and inconsistencies in the glass, and the silver, and, and....

I can't testify to the quality of the glass negatives, but I can testify to the fact that as much as people like to believe, even the best modern analog capture sources aren't anywhere near practically infinite, even in the best laboratory conditions.