NASA wins Twitter award, By Doug Beizer, Federal Computer Week, Feb 13, 2009. "NASA’s use of the microblogging Web site Twitter to provide updates about the Mars Phoenix Lander mission has won the agency an award for one of the best uses of social networking media, the agency said."

Thanks to BoingBoing.net for posting about NASA's "remixable videos", audio clips, and images, as well as a DIY Podcasts page.

You can mix and mash these video clips with NASA images and your own narration, original video, special effects and transitions. Preview the video and download the clips you want to use in your creative masterpiece.

I hope the collection grows. It looks like the only remixable videos so far are about spacesuits.

Anyway, I thought this would be fun for those of you who love mashups! I become more and more impressed with the NASA website and all the cool stuff it has to offer. I hope they continue to post more remixable videos and audio files for us to download and manipulate.

According to a press release, NASA and Internet Archive on Thursday "made available the most comprehensive compilation ever of NASA's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video.... [T]he Internet site combines for the first time 21 major NASA imagery collections into a single, searchable online resource."

• NASA and Internet Archive Launch Centralized Resource for Images, PRNewsWire, July 24, 2008.
• NASA Images

The Internet Archives says that it entered into an agreement with NASA in 2007 to create this service, but that the it receives no financial support from NASA. The project is currently funded through a grant from the Kahle-Austin Foundation and and IA is encouraging users of the site to help support this project.

Fire and Smoke, National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

NASA satellites, aircraft, and research know-how have created a wealth of cutting-edge tools to help firefighters battle wildfires. These tools also have helped scientists understand the impact of fires and smoke on Earth's climate and ecosystems. This Web site brings together NASA's latest images, research news, multimedia and other resources pertaining to this ongoing effort.

NASA photo, video collection to be digitized, Digital Silence (August 27, 2007)

NASA and Internet Archive of San Francisco are partnering to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video. The imagery will be available through the Internet and free to the public, historians, scholars, students, and researchers.

NASA selected Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, as a partner for digitizing and distributing agency imagery through a competitive process. The two organizations are teaming through a non-exclusive Space Act agreement to help NASA consolidate and digitize its imagery archives using no NASA funds.

"We're dedicated to making all human knowledge available in the digital realm," said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of Internet Archive.  

More interesting details at the above link.

There are some amazing data sets at this web site. These could be useful for patrons seeking data or faculty looking for free data sets for students to use on class projects.

NASA Global Change Master Directory, Discover Earth Science data and services

The mission of the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) is to enable the scientific community to discover and access Earth science data and services through distributed, integrated information technology systems. The GCMD offers authoring tools to achieve this mission, which conform to international standards. Tools are available to write, directly submit, and directly update metadata records.

G.Projector - Global Map Projector

Projecting the oblique spheroid known as Earth onto a 2 dimensional surface is one of the major issues addressed by Geographers and Cartographers. Robert B. Schmunk (rschmunk@giss.nasa.gov) at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies at 2880 Broadway New York, NY 10025 USA has created an excellent free resource called G.Projector.

G.Projector is a Java application which allows you to explore a large collection of global map projections. These may then be projected as an GIF, JPG or PNG equirectangular map image. Longitude-lattitude gridlines and continental outlines may be drawn, and the resulting map images may be saved to disk in GIF, PDF, PNG or PS form.

G.Projector requires that your computer have a Java 1.4 virtual machine, or better, installed. It is available to download at the NASA GISS site Click here.

Included at the site is a nice list of projections describing their characteristics. This is a great site for professionals as well as educators. The graphic representation creates a visual that will aid in our understanding of a some what complicated concept.

Here is the latest video from "Obsessive Documents Librarians" Productions:

This video highlights NASA publications available at many Federal Depository Libraries.

Like our other community videos, this one is posted to our videos page.

Think you can do a better job? So do I! Please create your own video celebrating Federal Depository Libraries or government information resources. Post it to the web and share the link with us so we can post it to the community videos page!

Update 2/12/2007 - Changed video source to Capitol Hill Broadcasting Network for higher video quality.