NCSA Astronomy Digital Image Library   Image Highlights Get By Code Data Search
NCSA Astronomy Digital Image Library     User's Guide

The ADIL User's Guide

Table of Contents

The Benefits of a Digital Image Library

Images make up an important part of the data in astronomical research, and the World Wide Web provides an excellent opportunity to make this data available to the entire research community. To meet this opportunity, the Astronomy Digital Image Library (ADIL) has been established, with the "books" of this Library being fully-processed and research-ready images in FITS format. The purpose of the Library is to collect these images from observatories all over the world and taken at all wavebands and make them available through the World Wide Web. With support from NSF, NASA, and NCSA, the Library also serves as a testbed for new digital library technologies.

The aim of the ADIL is to increase the astronomers' productivity through easy access to data. There are a number of ways in which a vast collection of research--ready images could be a powerful research tool:

Observers planning a new project can access previous observations to aid with sensitivity calculations or exploring new questions to be addressed.
New data can be compared with previous observations as part of a multi-frequency study of particular objects.
The availability of electronic versions of images and related figures will help astronomers in preparing figures for talks or papers.

The Library provides advantages not just to users looking for images but also to authors who contribute their images to the Library's collection:

The ADIL provides a convenient way for astronomers to archive their final, processed images and related data; getting the data back is a click away without having to mess with tapes.
It is also a convenient way to share data with collaborators and colleagues without locking up disk space on one's own Web or FTP site.
the Library offers another way to present scientific results complementary to the printed journal. For instance, after spending a paragraph describing a complex feature in the data, one could direct the reader to a URN in the Library to view an animation or VRML visualization.

There are also obvious benefits to the general public, as demonstrated by our recent ``visitor statistics''. The Library is an easy and fun way for people to learn what is new in astronomy. With wide variety of images in the collection, it is fairly simple to gather together a subset of images for an exhibit for non-astronomers.

Clearly, no library can be effective without "books". We are relying on the astronomical community to help build up the collection. We hope that the benefits of contributing images will be obvious and that authors will make it a routine part of the process of presenting scientific results.

NCSA Astronomy Digital Image Library   Image Highlights Get By Code Data Search
The AstronomyDigital Image Library is a project of Radio Astronomy Imaging Team
at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact the ADIL: adil@ncsa.uiuc.edu