Long time no post. (I'm reminded of Jeff Koyen's rant in his zine Crank against zine writers who would waste a page apologizing for not having published an issue in a while). I'm new to this and don't know the etiquette for being a slack blogger. So here it goes...
Haven't posted in a while because everything related to the giant project was mired in a giant glacier of legal and bureaucratic ice. After announcing to close friends, family and about two hundred folks at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences that was going to be working on this project - nothing really happened.
For those of you who don't know, here is the project. NASA Headquarters wants to unify all of their websites (of which there are a couple thousand) under one big umbrella site. They want all the imagery and video that is currently online all under that umbrella. Next, they want all of the imagery (stills, slides, etc.) that isn't currently online to be scanned and placed online. And finally, they want all of their film and video holdings to be digitized and placed online.
This last phase of the project is where I come in. NASA picked the Internet Archive to do this project. I have a great deal of respect for the Internet Archive and its founder Brewster Kahle. The Archive has also given me a great deal of work in the past which has helped me pay the bills. Over the years, I've digitized many video collections for the Archive - over a thousand of the Prelinger Archive, hundreds of episodes of the Computer Chronicles, Deep Dish TV, over 600 public domain feature films and a hundred or so films from my own A/V Geeks archive. Lots of work but ultimately very rewarding - since this material is now freely available worldwide without advertising. So as the primary video/film digitizer for the Internet Archive, I've been tapped to help with this NASA project.
I was approached about the project almost three years ago - only a little bit before the first post in this blog - and got very excited. Everyone I talked to shared in my enthusiasm - although I could read a hint of disbelief in their eyes. Hell, I couldn't believe it. So, after the big announcement, I heard nothing and any inquiry from friends and family about NASA just added to the disbelief. I began to doubt that it was ever going to happen. Then the other shoe dropped. I got an email saying that the contract was signed and that there was going to be a meeting at NASA HQ in DC...
