I know I kicked this around a while ago but I can't seem to find the old thread.
Anyway, I'm increasingly frustrated in trying to find Apollo documents on NASA's NTRS. Searches are hard to conduct, documents disappear, links change even for documents that don't go away, and of course the entire site goes down when the government does. It's hard to refer people to them without putting them up on my own site.
I have amassed a pretty large collection, mostly from the NTRS but also from elsewhere, and would be interested in merging it with anyone else's to make a comprehensive archive. I am willing to contribute the web server for the project but as I am a communications and low-level networking guy, not a web programmer, I could use a volunteer to help set up the web interface and submission mechanism.
The first step would be to just collect everything everybody has and cull out the duplicates. (I have a fast tool for this, at least when the documents are bit-for-bit identical.) Then cull out the non-bit-identical duplicates, discarding inferior or incomplete versions (or moving them aside so we can more quickly recognize them if resubmitted). Many of the documents have duplicate or out-of-sequence pages that need to be fixed. And of course there's the big job of sorting and indexing everything by mission, system, topic, etc. We will want revision control, starting with the originally submitted copy.
People could contribute however much effort to this as they want, and it can continuously evolve just like the ALSJ and AFJ; I'd be grateful just to have everyone else's archives so I can see how much I already have. I will try to find or build a tool that will allow people to determine if the document they have is already in the collection so it doesn't have to be uploaded again. Basically you'll compute a hash of the file locally and look it up in the online collection of hashes of existing files. If it matches, it's a dupe.
