With NASA in the news so much lately(1, 2, 3, 4), it seems a good reminder that the organization has nearly 70 Educator Resource Centers across the country.  These are fantastic resources to tap for information relevant to a wide range of learners.

From the NASA Educator Resource Center Network web site:

• NASA Educator Resource Centers provide services to those in the education community including teachers, scout leaders, public and private schools, homeschoolers, museums, planetariums, colleges and universities, and other education-related groups.

• It helps to be precise about your interests and requests, so have a topic and grade level in mind when you call. ERCs have limited amounts of materials available.

• NASA educational resources fall under categories such as Earth Science, Space Science, Living and Working in Space, Aeronautics, Aerospace, and topics related to Mathematics, Science, Technology, and Geography. Materials are designed to supplement K-University curriculum. Complete curriculum guides are not available from NASA.

I had the opportunity to visit the Educator Resource Center at the Kennedy Space Center a few years ago.  They were helpful, enthusiastic, informative, and had loads of reference material.  It reminded me of what a good library should strive for!

found via the NASA Do-It-Yourself Podcast blog

It’s called the Millennial Disc, and it is being marketed as a 1,000 year storage for digital information.

Before we run out and buy a stack of these for our archives, I would simply ask:

How many years before some aspect of this technology – the 5″ 12cm digital storage disc, the disc formatting, the communication channel between the drive and the computer – becomes obsolete?

This is not meant to be a snarky or rhetorical question.  The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has been dealing with those very issues:  extracting an obsolete data format from an obsolete storage media using restored obsolete equipment.  If the team didn’t have a couple of original machines, and a technician who understood how they worked, the images would be incredibly difficult (approaching impossible) to recover.  And this is going back only 43 years.

I used to use CD-ROM, CD-RW, and later the DVD variants, for most of my data exchange.  Now it is cheaper, easier, and faster to simply use a USB flash drive.  I don’t expect the 5″ 12cm disk to be around longer than 5 or 10 years.  Neither should libraries.

Any archival storage should utilize high-quality, durable storage material.  There should be a regular, ongoing evaluation as to when the storage media should be replaced.  Always keep some old equipment (with old software) around to ensure your ability to convert.

found via LISNews

In a merging of two of my great interests, NASA has issued a Request For Information (ROI) on how best to “analyze and catalog notes from spaceflight pioneer Wernher von Braun into an electronic, searchable database or other system.“

Sample Page from Von Braun's Notes

At first glance, this is something that would be solved by using library tools and software.  However, the list of potential ways to set this up seems to illustrate the gaps in library technology (all points are mine):

• Users should be able to see the notes as they exist.
• The text in the notes, as well as all labels and notations, should be fully keyword searchable.
• All elements of the notes, including text, formulas, diagrams, etc. should be able to be targeted and described in a way that allows for keyword searching.  This includes “tagging”, but also commentary, description and critique.
• Users should be able to define relationships (create links) between ideas within the notes, as well as documents and other resources from other collections.  For instance, someone seeking information on the Saturn V Engine Bell should find all drawings, notes, diagrams, and formulas within the notes, as well as outside resources relating to all of these.

This project begs for a combination of a traditional database (for storing and searching text) with the added functionality provided by social software products.  Nothing in the list is beyond the current means of technology… think  of a wiki combined with flickr-type functionality that can utilize PDF documents and you have a good starting point.

Why hasn’t this been done?  How many libraries and archives have document sets like this that could become a researcher’s favorite collection, with the right application of technology?  Have any been digitized with a social annotation feature?

Why do I suspect that the development of this will come from outside the library community?  We should already have projects that utilize this kind of mash-up philosophy… our collections could be so much more powerful.

There are some great things being done in the library technology realm, and many people and projects that are worth praising.  But now and then I see something like this and wonder how we missed this obvious application of existing technologies.

found via ResourceShelf and Wired Science

NASA’s Inclusion and Innovations Council has released a follow-up to Barriers to Innovation and Inclusion (link goes to my post containing the embedded video) which shows ways to encourage innovation and inclusion:

Again, I think that the lessons from this group are applicable to any organization in need of innovation.  As you watch the video, think about how you respond to others, and what you can change to encourage ideas from people.

One of the examples is of what they call “servant leadership”, the idea that supervisors should put their efforts into making it easier for those within their areas to innovate.  I see what I have called a “flat” hierarchy, which is the idea that we all should do what we can to make an idea fly, regardless of what our job description says.

found via Wayne Hale’s blog – read his entry for a prime example of the cost of discouraging someone on the brink of innovation.

I am a bit of a space freak (several people will read this and say “A bit???”), so this touches on two of my interests.

NASA’s Inclusion and Innovations Council recently had a all-day report period on barriers to inclusion and innovation at the agency.  Changing the institutional behaviors that stifle people’s incentive to provide ideas and input has been a priority at the agency since the loss of Columbia.

One of the reports was not presented as a printed report or a displayed set of slides.  It was a video posted on YouTube, and charted the process in which a NASA employee attempts to contribute an innovative idea to a project.

Barriers to Innovation and Inclusion.

Next, read Wayne Hale’s blog entry about this video.  Recognize that this is a person who has worked in an organization where this type of behavior not only stifles innovation, it can cost lives.  Yet the behavior exists in many places, including many libraries.

Does this seem familiar?  Have you known someone who had an idea, perhaps outside of his or her job description, who was “handled” in this sort of way?  Have you been this person?  Have you been this person’s supervisor, or someone who was approached with an idea?  Did you discuss chains of command, or supervisors, or that it had been done some other way for years?

This is not an issue just for NASA; this is an issue for any organization that risks demoralizing employees and locking themselves into bureaucratic irrelevance.  This might be your library.  Watch the video, and then watch yourselves and others to ensure that you are not part of the problem, but part of the solution.

One part of the solution is to generate ideas, good ideas about anything and everything you observe.  Express them to anyone who can use them; express them in a constructive, positive way, and give people every reason to consider them for adoption.

Another part is to watch for ideas from others.  Encourage them to brainstorm and to express their suggestions.  Be supportive, offer constructive advice, and be that echoing voice during staff meetings or at the break room table saying “That sounds like it has potential!”

Yet another part is to watch yourself, ensuring that when someone makes a suggestion or presents an idea, that it is the suggestion or idea that is discussed, not the bureaucratic structure or the current procedures that dominates your response.

Think about how much better your library, as well as everyone else’s library, can be, if we only encourage innovation and inclusion.  Think about it.

found via Librarian in Black

There is a great collection of links about the current shuttle mission on ResourceShelf.  I had intended to post this on Friday, before the launch, but better late than never.

FYI, spotting the shuttle in orbit is a neat experience (I saw it for the first time last July 4th), and the SkyWatch site does a nice job at letting you know when good opportunities exist for your location.  I definitely recommend it!

It’s WikiSky!

Ideal for answering the question “was that object in the western sky a star or planet?”, as well as  many other star / constellation type questions.  It also includes photographs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which means that you can view photographs of that same area of sky.

It’s not at the “web-based, jump in – the water’s fine” stage (though they indicate that they are working towards this), but the United States Geologic Service (USGS) has developed a National Land Cover Database from 2001 LandSat imagery.

This information provides very detailed (98ft square) information on every piece of land in the lower 48 states. If you have an interest in this, and don’t mind working with database information, check out their web site!

from ResourceShelf

Google’s Moon Shot is the title of an article in the current New Yorker magazine.  The title refers to a quote that likens the Google Book Project to Nasa’s Project Apollo.

Quite a bit of interest in this article, including the estimated number of books in WorldCat:  32,000,000 (note that the WorldCat site indicates “over 1 billion items”.

posted on Web4Lib

When I listen to the audio of Neil Armstrong’s words during the first moon landing, I have heard the “a” ever since I found out that it was what he meant to say. Whether that was wishful thinking, or if I was hearing what the software detected recently (follow the links if you don’t know what I am referring to).

Print version of the news story

NPR’s All Things Considered audio version (includes several playings of the recording).

One additional note:  I think that every newspaper that ran the original quote back in 1969 ought to run a correction tomorrow, just for kicks. 

NASA recently made 1100 Apollo-era documents, including Mission Reports (I have read several, and they are truly fascinating to those interested in manned spaceflight), Evaluation Reports, Scientific Studies, and Interviews, available on a DVD-ROM, calling it the Lunar e-Library. Fantastic! All are government documents, and putting them all together like this is a boon for researchers, enthusiasts, historians, librarians, and such.

However, they contracted for software that limits distribution of the software itself to employees of NASA. That’s it. Game over.  Nobody else can use this wonderful DVD. There are several good options in the open source software world for this project, and the only restriction would be that the software license would need to remain open. No big deal.

Why keep all this wonderful information closed off? This would have been one of the great DVD-ROM offerings, except it cannot be offered to the public because of a restrictive software license, and for no good reason. Arrrghh!

from Catalogablog

…it didn’t, and won’t, appear so from the Earth (unless something goes very, very wrong)!

Nasa ; UniverseToday ; Bad Astronomy

Planet Quest is a 3-Dimensional interactive viewer for the Milky Way galaxy.  It works on any modern browser without downloading additional software, a definite plus!

from SpaceRef