The Library & Archives of the San Diego Air & Space Museum has achieved a very notable benchmark! Over the past several years, the staff and volunteers of the Museum have digitized over 180,000 images and placed them on the Flickr Commons. We believe that ours is the largest aviation related image collection on the web, and it has become quite well known among aviation enthusiasts. It is so popular that, according to the Flickr stat page, in late February, our images surpassed 100 million views. In addition to this, tens of thousands of comments and tags have added to the images by the public who is excited to share their knowledge about our one of kind photo archive. However, we still have over two million images which have yet to be digitized, so this ambitious project still has a long way to go.

Convair/General Dynamic Atlas Collection

The Library & Archives is pleased to announce that they received a two-year National Historical Publications and Records grant in March 2015 from the National Archives and Records Administration to continue our Great Explorations: Increasing Access to Our Aerospace Heritage program, specifically providing for the digitization of 50,000 Atlas missile and space launch system images. Through the digitization of these records from our one-of-a-kind General Dynamics Atlas missile and space launch vehicle collection, Great Explorations will greatly advance research into the history of America’s national defense, the space program, the development of the aerospace industry, and the Cold War. We are very fortunate to have a large group of dedicated, highly skilled volunteers who will continue support of our Great Explorations effort, many of whom have been involved in our successful special projects in the recent past. It is important to note that last year, the Museum’s thirty L&A volunteers contributed 7,279 hours of dedicated effort, a 71 percent increase from the year before.