NASA: Images that are out of this world

NASA has launched a new website to house its vast media archive in a single online resource. Nasaimages.org currently offers visitors more than 140,000 digitized high-resolution photographs, audio and film clips. The launch of the site marks the end of the first phase of a five-year effort to make millions of the American agency's historic images accessible online to the public, said Debbie Rivera of NASA.

The joint project with the Internet Archive also involves the addition of Web 2.0 tools to the site. For example, NASA's programmers are developing Wikis and blogs for users to share content. "There's a lot more to come," Rivera told Computerworld. "This is only the beginning." The Internet Archive, founded in 1996 to create a web-based library, is hosting NASA's new interactive image gallery on 2,000 Linux servers at its San Francisco headquarters.