I want the UMSF community to think about the concept of a Library
devoted to Space History. Perhaps, this is a function that is already
served by the Smithsonian Air and Space facility.

However, what concerns me is that there doen't seem to be one
main repository for all of the fascinating and significant data and
images and stories that I have seen displayed on the UMSF forum.

What does the community think about this concept? What can we
do to foster a library or an institute to serve as a entity devoted to
this subject that is dear to all of our hearts?


Another Phil

I can think of one institution that might be interested in doing it: the University of North Dakota -- which has a quite extensive space history department which publishes "Quest", apparently the only American magazine devoted exclusively to space history. (That's where I got my first print article published, although they don't pay their authors. Bah.)

It's a worthwhile suggestion, and I think I'll contact their department head to see if they're interested.

Another Phil:

To do it right would take hard cash - any billionares reading UMSF, I wonder?

Not that it'd take all that much... ...just loose change (for a billionaire).

Bob Shaw

Just a few more thoughts concerning this idea. As I have seen
on the UMSF posts, we are a community who have accumulated
a good deal of unique and valuable resources. By this, I mean
books, articles, photos, software that stretch back 40 or 50
years.

I know that we are all devoted Space Nuts, but how many of our
friends or members of our families are equally obsessed? What
worries me is the fate of this material when another generation
takes our place on this Earth.


I would like to see a way for our wealth of knowledge to
survive us. In that way, those young people who are just now
getting "hooked" on space exploration (the way that most of us
did in our youth) will have some place to go to learn about the
birth of this era. To them, it will truly be history, whereas, for us
it was something that we witnessed.

The UMSF forum is an excellent place for us to gather and share
out knowledge and our fascination. I have learned a lot from the
comments, documents and images that have been posted here.

However, to truly pass on this data to those who come after us, it
is necessary to have hard copies of these data. There is nothing to
replace the images, reports, books and articles that we possess.
Those documents are priceless, but they can all too easily be thrown
into the "waste bin of history" by unknowing friends and family.

I have been to NASA's History Office at HQ in Washington. They do
a great job of preserving NASA documents. However, the material that
is in the collections of some UMSF members would not be found there.

Those are my thoughts, so far, on this.


Another Phil

One great resource, about all sorts of scientific knowledge, is the Linda Hall Library. It is the world's largest library of science and technology. I can't begin to tell you how valuable it has been to my own research on the Soviet space program.

Strangely enough, it is in Kansas City. One of America's richest Corn magnates willed his entire estate to this project in the 1940s. I kid you not.

I think it's a great idea.

A few thoughts, though.

(1) I suspect you may mean "archive" rather than "library". Some libraries I know of have a habit of disposing of parts of their collections once said parts reach the end of their use-by dates, which in science can often be quite short. For example, I wonder how many of the various books on Mars published during the 1960s and 1970s you would still be able to find on library shelves?

(2) The Wayback Machine site (www.archive.org) is attempting a general archive of the WWW. Some of what they have to say here is potentially relevant to what you seem to have in mind.

(3) What will the library/archive be trying to preserve? Books, disks, tapes etc on the subject-matter in question or the data contained in those books, disks, tapes, etc?

The two are not the same. For one thing anybody who can read can read a book, but given the passage of even a comparatively short period of time data in electronic formats may no longer be accessible, not merely because the media on which the data was written may have degraded but because the hardware to read that media may no longer be available (or at least in a functioning condition) to read it.

If the aim was to preserve the original materials then would require (in the case of the electronic ones) having the hardware to read those material available and still functioning. Not to mention periodic conservation measures to prevent the materials degrading.

On the other hand, preserving the data would require periodic migration of that data to newer and more up-to-date media. Plus you would need some kind of backup system to protect the data against catastrophic hardware failure.

Either way, both options are likely to be expensive and on-going exercises.

(4) What happens if such a library/archive acquires multiples copies of the same book, image, etc? Does it keep all of them or just one? Alternately, does it only keep selected ones? (Eg the best-preserved copy plus another less-well-preserved copy which was signed by the author.)

If the policy is to keep everything then eventually a large amount of shelf space and/or computing storage will be required.

Take the case of the Wayback Machine mentioned above, which takes the "preserve everything it can get its hands on" approach. Its FAQ notes: "The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress." (A petabyte is a million gigabytes.)

All that data is "stored on hundreds of slightly modified x86 servers".

A space history library/archive may not be quite that big, yet it has the potential to be very big, especially if the ambition is to preserve both the data (eg images) & the media they came packaged in (eg books).

======
Stephen

Ah. So there has been at least one powerful magnate that was actually able to pick something up (to steal another line from Rocky & Bullwinkle)?

Fascinating. I've never heard of this place -- and I lived in northern Missouri as a science-obsessed kid.

You know, guys -- this forum is very interesting, yes. It captures an ongoing process of speculation (some learned, some not as learned) about a wide variety of subject matter that falls generally within the topic of UMSF.

But that's mostly what it is -- a process of speculation.

The images that some of our wizards generate for us are mostly kept on other sites, or (in full resolution) only on the given members' computers. And a majority of that imagery is generated from lossy jpg-encoded public releases that aren't good for anything except making pretty pictures from. The small minority of images and other data processed from the PDS releases is another matter -- but those are in the definite minority on this site.

I'm not saying it's not worth archiving the process. It's a fascinating example of interaction on a mostly scientific-process kind of level. But, seriously -- we're not, most of us, professionals in these fields. And those of our little band who are professionals are documenting their work in more permanent forms, anyway. (Actually publishing them, in books and professional periodicals, etc., etc.)

I guess my point is that, while this forum is a wonderful experience for most of us, great history it probably ain't. Worrying about whether my pearls of wisdom, as embodied in my 1,000-plus posts here, will be saved for future generations, well... it just doesn't keep me up at night.



-the other Doug

I think that a lot of the data and documents would be interesting to archive. However, it need not be physical. If an institution such as a university would host it, it could be created in a virtual sense. And such a site could be mirrored, which would go even further to protect the data...libraries can burn, servers can fail, but the likelyhood of mirrors around the world being lost is much lower. And many of these old documents (including one on Mariner IV currently sitting on my desk that I have borrowed through interlibrary loan) are in fragile condition, which would make producing an online version a high priority.

I suggested an archive when we lost 'victoria on the horizon'. You can find Doug's response in the 'what happened' thread. I do think UMSF is important historically. Our discussions may be mainly (though not entirely) of transient import from the point of view of content, but as a landmark of constructive use of the internet and direct lay participation in the process of scientific discovery the site has no peer or precedent that I know of. That somebody will want to do a historical thesis on us one day I have no doubt. It would be good if they had all the original material to work with.