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NASA Requests Help With Von Braun's Notes
DynaSoar writes "NASA is soliciting ideas from the public on how best to catalog and digitize the collected notes of Wernher von Braun. 'We're looking for creative ways to get it out to the public,' said project manager Jason Crusan. 'We don't always do the best with putting out large sets of data like this.' The PDF notes are those of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the first director of NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and are typed with copious handwritten notes in the margin. According to the official request for information, NASA needs ideas on what format to use (PDF), how to index the notes, and how to create a useful database. The unique nature and historical value of the data, literally discovered in boxes six months ago, is what motivated NASA to ask the public for ideas."
Seems to have a habit of just dumping things in warehouses and forgetting about them.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
group-iv tiff + ASCII, key-value metadata descriptor in XML. Keep it generic.
They got that million dollar touchless scanner that can digitize the papers with ease, then put them into either Open Source or PDF formats.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Ha, Nazi schmazi," says Wernher von Braun
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun
Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun
You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German oder English I know how to count down
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun
On the next thing that goes up to space (or even just a suborbital flight), crank down the window at about 20km up and throw the stuff out (or have some automated thingy with an explosive bolt that distributes it into the atmosphere). Now THAT would be a "creative way to get it out to the public".
Then again, maybe that would be TOO creative.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Is that like Fist Post?
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
Lets go with a format almost anyone can read. As soon as their all scanned in as high res TIFFs THEN you can begin to OCR them and create hybrid PDF's which CAN be indexed. From there we have a good start with high quality originals and searchable dirivitives. Then people can start rolling whatever custom solutions they want to.
Yes, I know that OCR is going to be very crude, especially for anything hand written. But what it will do is get us a very good starting point. Id like to see a wiki set up with the OCR'd text as the beginning text, a link to the document and then the public can begin to go in and correct the OCR mistakes, and fill in what just flat out couldn't be OCRd.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Well, considering they host over 6,000 pdfs and the RFI is in PDF with the title of the document being "Microsoft Word - WvB RFI 6-24-09.doc" by Jason Crusan who used Acrobat Distiller 7.0.5(Windows), I think we know what everyone uses at NASA. Fine. I'm not going to bitch about that. Instead I'm going to point out that if you're already dependent on Adobe Acrobat Reader & Microsoft Word being around until the end of time supporting your old doctypes, you might as well release these in PDF from DOC sources too.
... you will need at least one or two people on your staff to administrate. Diagrams and drawings will probably need to be cropped and retained as images. Keep those in a lossless format but distribute whatever saves you bandwidth.
But, if I were doing this: Assuming these are all in images, put the images in whatever format you want and make a generic wiki page for each of them. Then let users log in (NASA fans should pour in) and translate the pages to annotated wiki pages with the footnotes (normally references) being all the side notes that were penciled in. They can categorize them by related missions and maybe even tag them
Once that's done, ideally you'd put it in some XML standards based format (ODF or OOXML, yeah, that's another argument to be had) that you will always be able to read even if you have to build your own viewer/converter. Keep these sources indexed and provide for people the rendered PDF/PS/PNG/whocares and then you could probably build scripts to rebuild all from sources if you want. New technology comes out or people want to view them in HTML 5--no problem, just build a neat little XSLT for them.
As for indexing them, I can tell you one way not to do it. Don't do the thing that curators of classical music did. Man, that's like speaking another language to me. Arrange the notes by mission or date if you can and any natural titles that arise for the favorites, add to it as an alias.
My work here is dung.
Thanks NASA for making me feel like my opinion is valued and useful. Kind of like that, oh what was it called? The vote for the name of that satellite thingy? When really you're just passing the buck because your budget didn't include "digitizing old notes."
You guys clearly do not read enough electronic media. PDF and Djvu are the more widespread and relatively ubiquitous modern electronic book formats. Djvu tends to be vastly superior to PDF in terms of file size though.
Read all about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djvu
Discuss.
We're looking for creative ways to get it out to the public
By rocket mail!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mail
What about Project Gutenberg?
How about take a page from the Talmud? Seems a perfect format, and there's been thousands of years of indexing of that document.
How about something like this? http://tobaccodocuments.org/
instead of focring people to pay taxes on some project of dubious desirability, they are trying to see if the public has any support for their idea, before they thrust headlong into it.
government workers should ask the opinion of the taxpayers more often, we are after all , their bosses. i have a lot of respect for the government employees that remember this, and nothing but contempt for those who want to 'play social engineer and tax waster' without regard for what the public thinks.
Unfortunately, the notes are full of non-words, like (RTG), SNAP-10A, B70, n.mi
At least, that what i'm assuming they say, because some of them are rather unreadable. Now, slashdotters may recognise some, but many people won't see the "words"