The facility can accept glass plates and films up to 500mm x 500 mm in size, although to date the most frequently scanned plates are those from the major Schmidt Telescopes.
Users can receive the raw pixel data for their plates, or solely the object data or both.
Data transport is usually in the form of exabyte or DAT tape in TAR format. The facility is available for routine scanning of user's plates on request. This database will be distributed on CD-ROM, and made available for network access.