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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.
Are you sure about the stability of glass plates? I hear a lot of people have real trouble with windows stability! Sorry, I'll go now....
Like Wargaming?
> I spearheaded a "digital backup" of around 90 filing cabinets of papers ...
> It took 2 years and way WAY WAY less than $5,000,000 to do it
500,000 plates. Over 2 years, assuming 50 wks/yr means just 5000 plates need be scanned per week. 1000 plates per day. 125 plates per hour. And this is large, fragile glass with really high data density, so you have to be a) careful in handling and b) use slow high-res scanning.
Let's take a guess that it takes only 10 minutes per plate (to fetch, tag, load, scan, and return). So we need only 20 people to scan 125 plates/hour.
Well, assume 20 scanning people and 1 IT guy handling the sysadmin work for the petabyte storage. Also one scientist/manager. Take a low intern/grad student $35k, 1 sysadmin at $65k, 1 PM/sci at $85K. All x2.5 for overhead, for 2 years. That's $4.25 mil in salaries.
There's also buying a redundant petabyte and all the necessary gear. I'm amazed they figure $5mil can do it.
A.