NASA Consolidates Multimedia Library Into A Single, Searchable Website

NASA has finally made it easier for everyone to find and browse their multimedia library which includes photos, videos and audio from their archives as they have consolidated it into a single, searchable website at http://images.nasa.gov. The archive is easy to use: simply type in a keyword in the search bar then the user can filter out the search result in the resulting page. For example, if you want to look up photos of Uranus, you can narrow the results by ticking out videos and audio, and narrow the results even further by adjusting the year slider which ranges from 1920 all the way through 2017.

As great as the archive is right now, NASA is still in the process of moving these files into the multimedia library because not all has been digitized yet and it comes from their multiple field centers. This means that although there are many photos up on the website right now, it is not even close to a quarter of what NASA has. The sample search of Uranus for example only has 104 hits with all criteria open. Just the Jet Propulsion Laboratory alone has thousands more.  “It was, to be honest, pretty frustrating because you had to have a lot of knowledge about NASA itself to know where a particular image might be,” said Rodney Grubbs, imagery program manager for NASA.They have tried the archive before partnering with commercial companies in the 2000s but according to Grubbs,  “It did not result in something that helped us,”

The task of consolidating over 100 collections eventually started again, this time partnering up with a company called InfoZen. “One aspect that enabled this project was that it was completely cloud-based and NASA did not need to make any hardware investment,” InfoZen chief executive Raj Ananthanpillai told Ars Technica. “The NASA library is implemented as immutable Infrastructure as Code in a cloud native architecture using AWS services. The makes for an extremely responsive user experience for the public as images and assets are propagated around the world.”

In other words, the result speaks for itself, having a very responsive, searchable multimedia library that contains a vast array of content collected through the years. Just don’t expect any alien  or UFO photos as classified materials are not going to be there.