Chances are, it is on your desktop or in your home already: Multimedia Personal Computing (MPC). It is the ability to freely mix text and images (and sometimes sound) in a common video display that permits rapid access to enormous volumes of information. Twenty-five (going on 26) years worth of lunar sample processing records represent another example of information enormity with deeply embedded, unique scientific and historical meaning. And now lunar samples have met MPC.

Since the times of the Apollo landing missions in 1969-72, each of the original 2196 samples returned from the Moon has been bookkept with a "data pack", which represents the complete collection of paper records for that sample, including work orders, processing notes, and photographs. Over time, as samples were subdivided for research, the number of subsamples continuously grew (to more than 97,000 as of December 1994) as did the volume of associated paper data packs.

In 1994, we began to convert our treasure of data packs into electronic records through optical scanning and storage. Our motivation was not to be trendy but to securely preserve irreplaceable documents, including aging Polaroid photographs that show critical subdivisions of samples. Although we previously used microfilm and microfiche techniques to backup the paper records, the new MPC system will be faster, more economical, and of much higher fidelity with respect to photographs. Because the records will now be digital, they will be safely accessible to all future computer systems.

The hardware components of the document imaging workstation consist of a 486/66 IBM-compatible personal computer with a 1.8 gigabyte hard drive, a 21-inch high-resolution monitor, a flat-bed scanner, and a 1.3 gigabyte rewritable optical drive. The software for the system is FileMagic, a Windows-based document and image management application which controls the scanning, storage, and retrieval of documents. These documents may be scanned images or they may be electronic files stored in their native format, such as Microsoft Word. A document-oriented database is used for tracking the locations of the document files and for describing them with terms deemed appropriate for subsequent retrieval. The format and amount of information recorded may be defined by the users.

For the data pack project, sheets from the data packs are organized into "documents" and then scanned, indexed, and stored using the FileMagic application. Photos are stored as gray scale images with 256 shades of gray and forms are stored as black and white line art images. Gray scale and line art images may be mixed in asingle document, so that photos and forms for a single processing operation may be stored together as a single entity.

Currently the document imaging workstation is operated as a stand-alone system. The images are stored on removable optical drive cartridges and the FileMagic application and database are stored on the computer's hard drive. Future plans include the migration of the system to a file server with the database and application residing on the server and the optical disks residing on a juke box attached to it. With this configuration, the data pack information may be accessed by any Windows-based PCattached to our local area network.

The lunar sample data pack scanning project began on Aug. 22, 1994. As of Jan. 1, 1995, 581 of the 757 Apollo 17 data packs have been scanned and indexed. Because the size of the data packs varies greatly depending on the original mass of the sample and the number of times that it has been subdivided, a "complexity index", calculated by multiplying the number of splits by the number of parents for each generic sample, is used for tracking progress. The 581 data packs which have been scanned represent 54% of the Apollo 17 collection and about 10% of the total lunar sample collection. Based on the progress thus far, the estimated time for completing the project is between 3 and 4 years. But the reward will be knowledge that the lunar sample records are secure for the future in electronic formats that will be accessible to a wide community of users.

What's next? Along with our team mates in the sample-processing laboratories, we are eager to conduct pilot projects on automated weighing and digital photography of samples. Again, the aim is to handle large volumes of information as efficiently as possible (with as little new paper as possible) while keeping them secure for future generations of users.