NASA to digitize all its photos, videos

In an announcement Thursday, NASA said it has reached a deal with the nonprofit, San Francisco-based Internet Archive to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection. The effort will be paid for solely through grants, foundations and individual contributions received by the Internet Archive.

NASA already has much of its collection online, but the material is divided up into more than 20 different imagery categories, making it hard to find specific images or archives unless a user knows exactly where it is, said spokesman Bob Jacobs. "One of the challenges, and the thing that interested the Internet Archive, is that the agency didn't have digital media storage [procedures in place] as one of its core competencies," he said. "The bottom line here is that we have lots of assets ... but we had no real coordinated and certainly no comprehensive search capability ... to find the best of our images."

That will change with the creation of a single resource online where visitors can search and find the high- and low-resolution images and information they want, he said.

The agency will begin by providing the most easily accessible images and other resources so they can be put into the new online database, with additional material added as it is unearthed. "There's 50 years' worth of materials here, and it's in a variety of media and locations," including 10 NASA field centers, Jacobs said.