Preserving and Digitizing Astronomy's Heritage Observations
Elizabeth Griffin
Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics, 5071 West Saanich Road, Victoria,
The Astronomy possesses a heritage of something like 3 million photographic observations, distributed among observatories worldwide, dating back over 100 years, and encompassing spectroscopic, direct-image and objective prism observations of a very extensive range of objects and fields. The potential of such a database is vast, because of the propensity of all celestial objects to change -- in position, in velocity, in brightness and even in basic character. Opportunities to harvest such a richness must surely be uppermost in any research institution's priorities, given the relevance to Virtual Observatory projects. Unfortunately, what we find currently is the reverse; very few collections of plates have been digitized to research-quality standards, very few observatories have the resources, capacity, equipment and staff to carry out digitizing programmes, and almost no photographic archive has even an on-line inventory. In consequence, those plates are largely uncatalogued and unexploited, and as a research tool they are unsupervised and effectively unknown even to the very research community that will most benefit from digital access to them.
However, a few sterling efforts towards plate preservation and digitization are getting under way, and ingenious proof-of-concept projects are helping to demonstrate the important role of heritage data in present-day research. Once digital access is provided, the new science which only such material can enable will illustrate (far better than mere words can) the need to preserve for posterity not only the physical records but their detailed scientific content in machine-readable form. These challenges are shared by other sciences whose photographic, hand-written or taped heritage data, often of crucial importance, are also languishing, and may never be recovered.