The HST Archive was formally opened for archival research on 1 February 1993. Usage of the archive has increased steadily. By the summer, 3-5 Gbytes of data per month were being retrieved over electronic networks by astronomers outside the Institute. The present archive system, the Data Management Facility, consists of an archive machine with an optical disk jukebox and standalone optical disks drives, two database machines, and two user host machines. The archive currently contains about 1 Tbyte of data.
Users are able to query the archive catalog from guest accounts on the host machines.
There is a simple registration process for those who want to retrieve data. Once registered, users are able to retrieve data from the public portion of the data archive. In addition to describing the current archive system and our experience in supporting users, we will discuss a new archive system, the Space Telescope Data Archive and Distribution Service, and a new user interface, StarView. Introduction Since HST was launched in April 1990, nearly 5000 astronomical targets have been observed. About 1 Tbyte of raw and calibrated data have been produced.