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 museums collection. This demonstration will highlight the success of the San Diego Air and Space Museum (SDASM) to increase visitor visibility and interest in their museum by getting photographs from their archives up on Flickr. After working for ten years to digitize their photography collection 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 mission to implement new technology to provide increased visitor access and participation. More than 25,000 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 from the collection have been posted.  As a result, this collection has drawn more than three quarters of a million visits, four times the normal traffic to the museum’s site.