Seattle Museum of Flight

The Museum of Flight in Seattle, WA has made viewable part of their collection of air and spacecraft. The museum website boasts photos and information on approximately 150 models. They have also digitized more than 100 rare and historic airline logos.

Selection Decisions
It appears that the museum chose a sampling of their physical holdings and tried to represent each airline and a variety of craft types. For example, the collection includes an aerocar (half plane, half automobile), jet planes, a lunar roving vehicle, reconnaissance aircraft, gliders, and seaplanes. There are not enough models from each manufacturer to warrant research, and they likely chose these models because of their rarity and the likelihood of public interest.

Metadata
Each set of photos is accompanied by metadata including manufacturer, model, year, registration, location, whether the plane is viewable, and physical characteristics including wingspan, cruise speed, and range. The pages also give historical context for the plane and the current status of each model. Viewers can search by manufacturer or model, or they can work through the collection in alphabetical order by manufacturer. The airline logos include no metadata apart from the airline name and are ordered alphabetically. Without knowing the year or history of the logos, they are out of context.

Object Characteristics
Most of the crafts are represented by two photos – one archival photo of the plane from the period in which it was in general use (black and white photos primarily), and another of the craft today (color). One cannot use a zoom tool, but most can be enlarged to double the original size with the same resolution. The images are rather low-quality (about 100 dpi) jpegs.

Audience
The sizes of the photos are not research-quality by any means, and researchers undoubtedly would require multiple views of the interior and exterior of the planes. However, the collection could be very useful to enthusiasts or the general public looking to visit the museum. For both the airline logo and craft collections, the staff included a short overview of what viewers might want to see from the collection in Seattle under the heading “Come to the Museum of Flight and see more.”