Digital Collections 2.0

The Museum of Flight is beyond excited to announce the relaunch of our Digital Collections site! The site address is unchanged from before (digitalcollections.museumofflight.org) but the look, feel and structure have been completely revamped. It is now easier than ever to search and browse our vast collection of digital materials, ranging from photographs to flight logs, manuals to maps, and oral histories to 3D objects!

The first version of our Digital Collections site was launched in 2017 as part of a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). It showcased thousands of digitized materials from our World War I collections, covering both the technical aspects of aviation during this period in time as well as the personal experiences of pilots, service members, and civilians during the Great War.

Shortly afterwards, we added the culmination of another grant project to the site, this one funded by Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC). Thanks to their Recordings at Risk grant, we were able to digitize and transcribe a collection of interviews with American fighter aces, who spoke candidly about their experiences in the World Wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Between the 5,000 items digitized through CLIR and the 200 hours of audio digitized through NEDCC, our Digital Collections site was a solid resource for those interested in military aviation in the 20th century, freely available to anyone at any time.

But that was just the beginning! Over the next eight years, we continually added new content to the site, expanding the scope to include not only military aviation but also commercial aviation, Pacific Northwest aviation, aerospace history and women in aeronautics. We focused our efforts on our most unique and rare items as we didn’t want our site to simply duplicate things that were already readily available elsewhere on the Web. Instead, we wanted to build a one-of-a-kind resource that was useful to researchers of all stripes.

By the beginning of 2025, we had amassed over 25,000 digital records and nearly 20 terabytes of data. We soon realized that we had become victims of our own success. Our mighty output taxed our poor web server, which grew increasingly sluggish as it struggled to index and search such a huge amount of data. We also found that we had outgrown our original site platform, a web publishing system known as Omeka.

Omeka is an open-source content management system built specifically for cultural heritage institutions, and it is a wonderful tool for displaying relatively small digital collections with simple, straightforward structures. Alas, we left behind “relatively small” and “simple, straightforward structure” several years ago. We now had a colossal set of records that linked to each other in all sorts of complex and exciting ways: via people, aircraft, squadrons, organizations, companies, time periods and so on.

So what’s a Museum to do when they’ve surpassed their own digital expectations? They roll up their sleeves and climb to the next level! Following an in-depth consultation with experts in the data field, we set out to find a new web platform that could handle our ever-growing dataset. We ultimately selected Recollect, a robust content management system that functions as both a back-end database for managing digital assets and a front-end search portal. For the past six months, we’ve been hard at work transferring our data and building this new, enhanced version of our Digital Collections website.

Here are a few things we’re excited to roll out:

• A more logical display of records, with the digital file neatly displayed alongside its corresponding metadata.
• The ability to seamlessly zoom in and out within a file and to switch to full-screen mode to study items in even greater detail.
• Built-in Optical Character Recognition for text items, allowing users to perform full-text searches across our vast collection of digitized books and text documents.
• Enhanced controls and faster streaming capabilities when viewing audiovisual items such as oral histories.
• Select access to our Object collection, which contains 3D artifacts such as uniforms, scale
  models, flight equipment, artwork, and much, much more. (And if you’re especially interested in our objects, be sure to also
  check out our newly launched Object Database: artifacts.museumofflight.org)
• New user features that allow you to control your research journey. Bookmark items to create your own curated collections, link 01 items directly to your social media accounts, and contact  us directly to easily inquire about specific records.

And this is only the beginning! In the coming months, we’ll be developing all sorts of new ways to browse our content. We’re particularly excited to roll-out Narratives, a tool that allows us to create digital exhibits based on our records. Imagine being able to read a biography about a particular pilot, watch their oral history interview, view images of their flight suit, and peruse the manual for their aircraft of choice—all with one simple click!

Are you excited yet? We hope so! The newest iteration of our Digital Collections launched July 2, 2025, so you can start exploring today. And feel free to send us feedback via the contact form on the site or by emailing curator@museumofflight.org. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the site!

On a personal note, I’d like to send a thank you to everyone who supported me throughout this project—to my ever-patient colleagues in the  Collections Department, to our steadfast IT staff, to the awesome team at Recollect, and to everyone who helpfully provided suggestions and  feedback. Revamping the Digital Collections site has been the highlight of my career so far, and I hope it makes The Museum of Flight community proud.

This article originally appeared in the September/October 2025 Issue of Aloft, The Museum of Flight Membership magazine.
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