The prompt book that had to remember everything, and still stay usable
In the wings, I flip through a thick prompt book. One actor has three costume notes, and they don’t agree. I need one running list for tonight, but I can’t bin the old notes. That’s like the NASA Exoplanet Archive: the book is the archive, each role is a planet, each note set is a different set of published numbers.
The festival grows, and the book starts to sag. Pages repeat, links between notes snap, and finding the latest call takes ages. The archive hit that too as more worlds and more number sets piled in. So it rebuilt the core tables and the paths through them, so it can expand without turning into a mess.
I start marking changes, not hiding them. A rumoured role gets moved off the main cast list, but the record stays where people can see it. A role that some directors can’t confirm gets a clear warning. The archive does the same: it keeps false alarms on file, and flags some planets as disputed.
Opening night needs a clean programme, one line per actor. Some lines miss a height or costume size, so I fill gaps with the best note I can find, or a sensible value based on what’s already known. The archive makes a “composite” planet list like that: one row per planet, made as complete as possible, while keeping every original source behind it.
Then the sound desk gets swamped with recordings from different kit. People want to lay tracks on top of each other and hear the difference fast, so we organise one shared desk for side by side listening. The archive did that for planet atmosphere readings, pulling scattered tables into one place so you can compare across instruments, old and new.
After the curtain call, outside crews turn up with clipboards and files. We pin one public callboard and set simple rules for uploads and who checks what next. That’s what ExoFOP became, one place to share follow-up notes and files. Under the hood, the archive also made it easier for computers to pull tidy tables, and started tools and templates to cut copy mistakes as the list keeps growing.