The San Diego Air & Space Museum has been awarded a three-year $250,000 grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for America to help fund the third phase of the Museum’s Great Explorations project.

The Great Explorations project, previously funded by IMLS, is intended to increase public access to the Museum’s collections through improved online records, images, and finding aids. The grant will also enable the Museum staff to continue its efforts to strengthen and optimize the Museum’s collection care and management systems.

“This grant will enable us to effectively document, track, and access our collections, which have grown beyond the capabilities of our current management systems. Streamlining these tasks will improve public access to our collections, and we will be able to provide more detailed information about our collections to researchers and expand our audience by providing a new platform for visitors to explore the Museum digitally,” said Katrina Pescador, Collections & Research Director of the San Diego Air & Space Museum.

During the second phase of Great Explorations, the Museum established new standards for maintaining collections information, requiring an update to old collections records to meet these new standards. However, the current collections management system (CMS) proved not compatible with the Museum’s future goals.  That is where this third, grant-funded phase of the project comes in. It will allow the Museum to acquire a new CMS to update records and implement new standards more efficiently and accurately. These records are important because they tell us what is in the collection, where it came from, how it got to the Museum, and its historical significance. All of this information is beneficial to the staff and public trying to access the collections for research and exploration. 

Additionally, the Museum’s Library & Archives’ software, EOS (an integrated library system) is inadequate for the Museum’s current needs, and the cost of this software is increasing exponentially. Both systems currently work independently and provide information to our digital asset management systems (DAMS) which stores high-quality images of objects for public viewing. As a result of this overlap, work can be unnecessarily duplicated.  A combined system will significantly improve workflow and reduce duplicated efforts. It will also enable users the ability to search in one location across all collection types.

To accomplish this, the Museum is seeking a new collection management software (CMS), hiring a Project Specialist to oversee the transfer of collections information into the new CMS, and integrating the new system into current workflows, including DAMS ingestion and storage. This project will greatly improve how objects are tracked and maintain collection information, saving staff time and money, while allowing greater public discoverability of the collections. In short, this project will help keep the history of the Museum’s objects safe and accessible for future generations!

This new collections management system will be a significant improvement to its existing ones, benefitting both the staff and the public. Going forward, the Museum will have a CMS that is fit for the digital age and will significantly improve online access by a remote audience.