A photo of a geodetic surveyor peering through a Wild T-3 theodolite from the top of a lighthouse can be found somewhere in NOAA’s digital archive. The picture is decades old. The man has a worn face. The ocean behind him is vast and uncaring, stretching out in all directions. Most people would scroll past this type of image, but it contains something priceless: proof of how people first started to measure, map, and attempt to comprehend the sea below them.
That image is one of about 70,000 that are currently included in NOAA’s Digital Collections Project, which has been quietly growing for years and has just entered a new, more ambitious phase thanks to a formal partnership with the Internet Archive. The collaboration, which was announced in late May 2026, unites two organizations with disparate strengths but a common concern: if important scientific and cultural records are not actively preserved, they will eventually vanish.
It is truly astounding how much is being digitized. In addition to the photo archive, NOAA’s digital collections contain over 2,700 first-hand oral history narratives from NOAA employees, scientists, fishermen, and members of the coastal community. There are audio testimonies from survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, records tracking red tide events along Florida’s west coast, and interviews with Black Georgian fishermen whose experiences are rarely documented in official scientific literature. When combined, these resources do more than simply record the ocean. They record what it’s like to live next to it, rely on it, and see it evolve.
Before fully understanding the significance of this data, it’s worth taking a step back to understand what the deep ocean truly is. Sunlight completely vanishes below 650 feet. Below 13,000 feet, which is about the average depth of the ocean floor, the temperature is slightly above freezing, the pressure is higher than 600 atmospheres, and animals like the dumbo octopus and gulper eel have to survive in a permanently black environment. Even though the deep sea is thought to make up more than 95% of Earth’s habitable space, it is still remarkably understudied by practically all standards. As a result, the information NOAA has acquired about these environments over many years is not only priceless but also essentially unique.
One unique contribution to this partnership is the Internet Archive’s institutional capacity for large-scale digitization. The Archive, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, has created infrastructure that most individual libraries just do not have for scanning and preserving physical materials. Although NOAA’s library, which was founded in the early 1970s and is based on the legacy of earlier federal agencies such as the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and the National Weather Service, has historically catered mainly to internal researchers and affiliates, it has an impressive collection. By pushing these materials toward open, public access in ways that were previously unattainable, the partnership significantly alters that calculus.
The relationship has been enthusiastically described by Liz Rosenberg, who oversees the Internet Archive’s physical donation program. She has observed that many people are unaware that the Archive preserves more than just websites. The fit was evident when NOAA initially reached out in 2022 to donate materials that fell outside the purview of its own collection policy. Due to their participation in the Federal Depository Library Program, both institutions have a natural point of agreement. Boxes of materials have since been loaded onto trucks, cataloged, and folded into the Archive’s Democracy’s Library initiative, which focuses on making government publications widely accessible.
The NOAA Library’s director, Ben Hope, put it this way: libraries perform best when access and stewardship coexist. It may seem apparent, but in reality, the two objectives frequently conflict with one another: one institution hoards rare materials for security, while another scans them freely but lacks the scientific know-how to understand what they contain. In this case, each library fills the void left by the other, at least theoretically.
It is genuinely unclear if this project will be able to keep up with the sheer amount of what already exists and what is still being produced. New footage, new sampling data, and new coral documentation are continuously produced by NOAA’s ocean exploration programs. Just the National Database for Deep-Sea Corals and Sponges is the result of years of meticulous fieldwork. One type of institutional challenge that is difficult to solve is maintaining the past while the present keeps coming in.
Nevertheless, something significant is taking place here. A Florida Keys fisherman is describing the reef’s appearance fifty years ago somewhere in an expanding digital archive. The first remotely operated vehicle dive into the bathypelagic zone is being described by a scientist. From a lighthouse, a geodetic surveyor looks out at an ocean that we still don’t fully comprehend. It is fortunate that those records even exist. Despite all the odds, it feels like progress that someone made the right decision to save them.
