CyArk: “Project Stores 3D Images of World Historic Sites in Limestone Mine”

From Computerworld:

When some of Iraq’s most historic sites were destroyed by war, Ben Kacyra decided to sell his civil engineering company and start a nonprofit in 2003 with the mission of digitally preserving cultural heritage sites throughout the world with 3D laser imaging.
Kacyra, an Iraqi-born U.S. citizen, is providing the open access to those images through his organization, CyArk (short for Cyber Ark).
In the U.S., CyArk has already created 3D digital images of Mount Rushmore, Spanish missions in Texas, and Tudor Place, home to six generations of George Washington’s family.
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CyArk’s 12-person team, based in Sacramento, Calif., creates the 3D digital models with laser-scanning instruments that replicate a site to within a few millimeters of accuracy.
Greaves said in an interview with Computerworld that collecting the digital images on disk drives has been expensive, and the current backup process is far to manual. Up until last September, CyArk’s digitization projects had only taken 60TB of disk, but with more than 500 future projects scheduled, the organization expects its storage needs to grow at 30% per year over the next five years.
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CyArk decided to switch its archive strategy to magnetic tape and purchased a tape carousel that used the linear tape file system (LTFS) open format to record the images. It has also partnered with Iron Mountain to store those images in perpetuity in the company’s limestone mine storage facility in Pennsylvania.

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See Also: Cool! California High School Students to Create 3D Archive of Mission Santa Ines (March 22, 2013)
This is a CyArk project.

Filed under: Digital Preservation, Interviews, News, Open Access, Profiles