Sometime in 2004 I was poking around my local public library, and I came across a quaint relic of the early 90s....their CD-ROM section.
These were those pre-commercial internet days, when shiny CD-ROMS were going to be the next big publishing medium. Browsing through the racks and chuckling at some of the selections (Learn Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS!), I came across a bulky four CD set from the United States Geological Survey, meant to teach Earth Science terms.
For kicks I took it out and tried to get the software to run on my machine. The presentation software was written in DOS, and while I'm sure it was great for it's time, it took a lot of coaxing to get a semi-modern machine to run it at all.
It's an interesting digital relic. I was impressed with some of the indexing on the images, particularly when I consider this was pre-photoshop and pre-debabelizer. In one of my early digital media classes we had to build and tweak a color palette for a series of images by hand. It sucked. A lot.
So, I had a lull between contracts, and I thought it would be interesting to save the information on the CDs for posterity, I also had some new PHP code I wanted to test out and figured this would be as good a project as any. Plus my geeky organization-fetish self enjoys being able to easily search and browse through the archive now.
Plus, before this site I was nowhere near to utilizing the disk space and bandwidth limits my web host has.
As hack archivist, I've included four text files with the original directory structure of the CD-ROM, as well as some of the original documentation and software. [links below]
- CD #1 (DDS21_1) File Structure
- CD #2 (DDS21_2) File Structure
- CD #3 (DDS21_3) File Structure
- CD #4 (DDS21_4) File Structure
- Other Files of Interest
Official USGS Archive
Many of these images have been previously posted online to the USGS Earth Science Photographic Archive. The images found on the USGS site are often of superior quality to those found here, since the images from the CD-ROMs have been indexed to 256 colors.
Each image listing has a link which will search the USGS archive by photo credit in an attempt to find the photograph. Unfortunately, the USGS search is primitive, and the credit information was poorly normalized on the CD. I've done some work to remedy this, but right now about 400 of the image listings will not turn up a result on the USGS site. Keep checking the site news on the homepage for updates.
If the image search returns no results, you may attempt a more general search yourself. I've had luck searching by the initial fragment of the credit. So, if the full credit reads ID. GILBERT, no. 2879, a search on ID. GILBERT would return all photos by Gilbert on the USGS site. With any luck, the image you want will be there.
If you manage to find an image on the USGS site that the search link here didn't find, sending in a URL would be a very kind thing to do.