SDASM and BPOC launch largest online collection of aviation photos on Flickr

SDASM Goes Digital, Puts 44,000 Images Online

Balboa Park Online Collaborative Project Launches

Balboa Park, San Diego–– Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) is proud to announce over 44 thousand images from the San Diego Air and Space Museum’s vast archives have been launched live on FlickR.com, making the SDASM the owner of one of the largest online collections of aviation images in the world.

“We have already seen impressive engagement from the public interacting with the images on Flickr, and it’s really just the tip of the iceberg when you consider the fact that the San Diego Air & Space Museum counts over one million images in its library collection,” said BPOC Director Rich Cherry. “ I applaud the museum for being proactive in this arena and jumping on board with us for such an ambitious project.”

Granting public access to the collection online with Flickr.com allows anyone from researchers and school students to aviation enthusiasts, veterans and the general public to view, tag and comment on the images, thereby adding valuable content and context to the collection. SDASM plans to have over 100,000 images digitized and posted online by the end of the year, including foreign and domestic military and civilian aircraft, the Flying Tigers, the Ryan Aeronautical Archive and the entire Pacific Southwest Airline (PSA) archive.

“We are very excited about getting this special collection online. This has been a goal of ours for a long time, and it is fulfilling to finally see it come to fruition,” said Jim Kidrick, President and CEO of the San Diego Air & Space Museum. “Sharing this incredibly unique image archive with the world is really what the mission of the museum is all about!”

After working for ten years to digitize archival images one by one, the SDASM archival team of Alan Renga and Katrina Pescador were able to step up those efforts with a new highly specialized rapid capture station, purchased by BPOC as part of its greater mission to implement new technology, training and web development programs throughout Balboa Park. The rapid capture imaging station is built around a high end DSLR Canon 5D camera rather than a flat bed scanner, which most museums have used for digitization work in the past. In the new, fully portable setup, the camera is attached to a copy stand, which stabilizes the camera and eliminates the need to adjust the exposure. An attached laptop then automatically processes the images. Since the camera is locked in place, archivists can quickly change out images, digitizing upwards of 700 images per day in some case.

"The San Diego Air and Space Museum has shown enormous initiative in bringing such a large and important collection out of the vaults and putting it online. The museum community and citizens alike will benefit from the museum's ongoing experiment with making larger, better, and more permissively licensed images available to the public," said Michael Edson, Director of Web and New Media at the Smithsonian Institution.

The SDASM is one of several cultural institutions within Balboa Park currently working with BPOC’s rapid capture stations to digitize archival images and publish their collection data online. The Museum of Photographic Arts, the San Diego Hall of Champions and the San Diego History Center (formerly the San Diego Historical Society) all plan to launch similar online collections in the coming months. Piotr Adamczyk, an analyst with The Metropolitan Museum of Art also contributed to the technical engineering of the project.

Balboa Park Online Collaborative was created to fundamentally change the way museums, cultural arts and science institutions in Balboa Park approach the use of online technology. It is intended to make online technology an integral part of the way the institutions fulfill their missions, interact with patrons, and collaborate, to improve their technology capabilities while reducing costs by bringing organizations with similar needs together on mutually beneficial projects.  Visit www.bpoc.org for more information.

San Diego Air & Space Museum is California's official air and space museum and education center. The Museum is an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, and it was the first aero-themed Museum to be accredited by the American Association of Museums. Visit www.sandiegoairandspace.org for more information.

Balboa Park is a San Diego must-see, just minutes from downtown, and ranked as one of the Best Parks in the World. The Park is home to 15 major museums, several performing arts venues, lovely gardens and many other cultural and recreational attractions–including the San Diego Zoo. With a host of cultural institutions laid out among its 1,200 beautiful and lushly planted acres, Balboa Park is the nation’s largest urban cultural park.

Balboa Park Marketing is a program of Balboa Park Central, a non-profit organization promoting the cultural and recreational use of Balboa Park.

Related Files

SDASM_FLicKR_release.doc

(Word Document)