Elizabeth S. Blog #7: NASA Images

NASA Images (nasaimages.org)
This online digital collection gathers together images from various NASA agencies. The website itself is not part of or funded by NASA itself. Instead, it is offered by Internet Archive (www.archive.org ), a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA's images, videos and audio collections.

Collection Principles
NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.

Object Characteristics
The site is powered by Luna Imaging, and takes advantage of the new version (introduced June 13, 2008). Luna offers many neat, Web 2.0 features, making it a fantastic resource for education. In addition to viewing and zooming seamlessly over the internet, users are allowed to download hi-res zipped jpeg files (for images).

Metadata
The images I looked at all had extremely rich descriptive metadata, including titles, description, filenames, dates, location, which agency generated the image and how many light years away the particular object is.

Intended Audience
According to the "about" section of the website, its goal is to "benefit humanity." That's a pretty big audience. It seems to have a very broad appeal. It is easy to use, unless java is a problem for one's browser.