Flat-bed commercial scanners as the tool for the creation of virtual archives of astronomical plates.

The astronomical plates that have been produced for more than 100 years may contain information on events or processes that have occurred in the sky at the moment of observation. The preservation of the unique information on the astronomical plates can be achieved by transforming it to a digital form and keeping it in an electronic data medium. This may be achieved with flat-bed commercial scanners equipped with a transparency extension. We have some experience of using such scanners as the tool for the creation of our observatory digital plate archive. To provide a high efficiency for the work with the digital plate archive a special database of about 2 × 10[SUP4] plates is now being created at the Main Astronomical Observatory, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]