Accelerating in Flight: Access to a Collection via Flickr

In an effort to get more of the Balboa Park Museum’s collections online and accessible to the public, the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) has been leading an effort to efficiently and quickly digitize the wealth of media in the Park’s museum collections. This demonstration will show how the San Diego Air and Space Museum (SDASM) has successfully digitized and placed on Flickr tens of thousands of images.  The SDASM archival team of Alan Renga and Katrina Pescador were able to complete this enormous task with a new highly specialized rapid capture station, purchased by BPOC as part of its mission to implement new technology to provide increased visitor access and participation. More than 40,000 images have been digitized from the photography collection of the SDASM’s archive using the rapid capture station since January of 2010. In May, the first batch of photographs were uploaded to Flickr and since then more than 100,000 images (including images which had been digitized during the past decade) from the collection have been posted. As a result, this collection has drawn close to a million and a half visits, eight times the normal traffic to the Museum’s site.  The demonstration will include images of the rapid capture station and will show the Flickr site.  SDASM staff members will be on hand to talk about planning, results and challenges that were encountered. The SDASM staff will also talk about and demonstrate a similar project they are undertaking involving the digitization of their 16mm films, which are being put on a YouTube nonprofit partnership channel.