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