Wednesday, September 18, 2002

U. of Pittsburgh Digitizes Decades of Astronomy Data to Aid Today's Researchers By BROCK READ Through a new digital archive, the University of Pittsburgh is making six decades of astronomy research available to scientists and ambitious armchair astronomers. The archive, called the Parallax Project, collects 10 volumes of data published by the university's Allegheny Observatory -- information dating back to 1910 that remains relevant to researchers today. Parallax -- the apparent difference in the position of a star relative to other stars when observed from two points -- is an essential measurement to astronomers, who use it to track the movement of stars over time. The more early parallax information scientists have access to, the more precise their current research will be, says Lance Lugar, head of the Allegheny Observatory's library. The observatory's recordings of parallax data are popular with astronomers because they were among the most accurate and complete of their time, according to Mr. Lugar. While advances in telescope and satellite technology have made more-accurate parallax readings possible, scientists still use the Pittsburgh data in a number of types of research, including studies of planets circling other stars. In addition to parallax data, the old journals digitized for the Web site offer a host of other celestial calculations and discussions of astronomical methods. Journal pages appear as scanned images, but visitors to the site can sift through the information they contain with a digital database that allows the documents to be searched by star name, parallax data, declination, and other criteria. Ed Galloway, director of digital library research at Pittsburgh, says he kept the needs of research scientists in mind when coordinating the digitization of the journals for the Web site. He worked with George Gatewood, the director of the Allegheny Observatory, to interpret the data contained in each volume and determine how the information could best be presented to visitors to the site. "We have a relatively small body of users," he says. "A majority of them come to us with a star or a coordinate in mind, and they want to find more information about it." Mr. Galloway oversaw the database's creation, which required a team of students to spend nearly a year culling information from the journals. He says the results justify the tedium. "The key to this project was that being able to search by parallax information is awfully unique. It's something you can't do with the physical journals," he says. The site is a treasure trove for astronomers, argues Mr. Lugar, because it makes the parallax recordings widely available for the first time. "There are very few copies of these journals," he says. "To actually find this data, you would have had to go to about a half-dozen libraries to make sure you'd got a complete set." Both librarians expect that the project will also help protect the observatory's journals, which -- because few copies exist -- have suffered from overuse. "From a preservation standpoint, these volumes are literally deteriorating on the shelves," says Mr. Galloway. While scanning the documents for the Web site, Pittsburgh created two reprints of each journal in an effort to keep the originals intact. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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