San Diego’s Air & Space Museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, hopes a recent $150,000 grant will help the institution increase online access to its already extensive aerospace collection composed of more than 170,000 objects. The Institute of Museum and Library Services Museums for America chose San Diego Air & Space for the three-year grant from more than 500 competing applications.
The San Diego Air & Space Museum expects the new grant will allow it to expand its collection to include several thousand more objects not yet on display in the building or online. The grant will drive the second phase of the what the museum calls its Great Explorations project to catalog, photograph and display the additional items, making them ready to be accessed online through a variety of social media channels.
The museum believes the recipients of the Great Explorations project will extend among a variety of audiences, including teachers, researching scholars, students, aviation enthusiasts, authors, film producers and other museum professionals. Once the new objects are cataloged and displayed online, the museum will offer the general public access to also be able to tag images with additional useful information that can be added to the metadata associated with the display.
