Archive for the 'Web & New Media' Category

Alien Hoax Revealed at the National Air and Space Museum!

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on November 2, 2011 in Aviation, Education, History, Research, space and Web & New Media.
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Last Friday, the Museum hosted an online conference devoted to critical thinking in the Internet age. Using four conspiracy theories in aerospace history to demonstrate effective research techniques, staff from our Museum, the US Department of the Navy, and National History Day engaged with students and teachers from across the globe.

Here are the topics we examined:

  1. What happened to Amelia Earhart? Did she crash in the Pacific, or was her disappearance fabricated as part of a government plot?
  2. Did Franklin Delano Roosevelt know about the attack on Pearl Harbor before it happened?
  3. What are UFOs and are we being visited by extra terrestrials?
  4. Did Americans actually land on the Moon? Or was it all an elaborate hoax?

 

Buzz

Buzz Aldrin salutes the American flag on the Moon.

We chose this theme because it provides excellent examples of why it is important to examine every story with a critical eye. Conspiracy theories always challenge the accepted narrative, interpreting details that institutional analysis either deliberately omits or cannot explain. As such, the people who question these official stories have already begun the process of critical thinking, but they haven’t necessarily followed through to the end.

In order to conduct a more thorough inquiry into each of these subjects, our presenters stepped through a critical thinking checklist that can be described in further detail on the Virtual Salt website. Shortly put, when examining any topic, one should evaluate its Credibility, Accuracy, Reasonableness and Support (CARS). If we apply this tool to any of the conference topics, we discover that the likelihood of conspiracy is very low, but it should be noted that this isn’t always the case. These questions are helpful for any historian or researcher and can be applied to any resource being considered — from newspaper articles to archival photos to historic artifacts.

 

close encounters

The mother ship model used for the 1977 film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" currently on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, VA.

The conference concluded with a panel discussion during which our historians described some of their most exciting discoveries. Our own Tom Crouch, senior curator in the Aeronautics Division, discussed how he determined that the wing tips of the world’s first powered airplane, the 1903 Wright Flyer were actually made from carriage spreaders. This contribution to the historical record shed light on who Orville and Wilbur Wright really were and how they worked. It was an exciting moment in his career.

Another panelist, Randy Papadopoulos, secretariat historian at the Department of the Navy, probably summed it up best when he described a particular “aha” moment he once had:

You realize, wow! This is a singular event. This is something that no one else has considered… The devil is in the details — you have to do some digging to find out, but when you do, you feel this tremendous sense of relief. [You realize] okay, I actually made a contribution that’s original. I’ve done something new here.

We’d like to thank all of our panelists for continuing to contribute original insights through their dedicated and thoughtful research. And thanks to everyone from around the world who participated in our online event.

For those who couldn’t attend, please check out the recordings online.

We enjoyed producing this conference, and we hope to do more. Please let us know what kind of topics you’d like to see us examine in future online events.

Ivey Doyal is a content manager in the Web and New Media Division of the National Air and Space Museum.

Jumping In Tweet First

Published by Vicki Portway on April 3, 2011 in Astronomy, Behind The Scenes, Education and Web & New Media.
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On Saturday, March 19, I was thrilled to participate in the first ever Sun-Earth Day Tweetup organized by the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center. It was also the first time the Smithsonian officially participated in a Tweetup. The event was a great opportunity to give twitter fans (aka “tweeps”) some face-to-face interaction with our research scientists, curators and educators, and provide some fun hands-on learning that illustrated the Sun-Earth connection.

We had discussed the idea of holding a Tweetup at the National Air and Space Museum for some time, so when Aleya Van Doren at NASA Goddard asked our Museum to participate in the Sun-Earth Day Tweetup, it was  a no-brainer for me and co-host Isabel Lara in our Office of Communications. We jumped at the opportunity to partner with NASA, learn from their experience, and meet some great Twitter fans. Museum educators, scientists, and volunteers were eager to participate as well, and we enlisted two of our social media friends at the Smithsonian, Sarah Banks (National Museum of Natural History) and Sarah Taylor (Public Affairs), to help us host.

On the big day, 100 Tweetup participants and NASA Goddard team members arrived at the Museum before we opened to the public.  Usually, this is a quiet time in the Museum, but that day there was a great deal of activity as staff and volunteers prepared for the Kites of Asia Family Day.  After watching the “3D SUN” IMAX film (as perhaps the first group of theater patrons ever encouraged to use our phones – we had to tweet, after all!), everyone split up into groups and took off to explore learning stations setup around the Museum.

RT JoeCLucas: Watching the surface of the sun in 3D on an IMAX screen. Freaking awesome. #nasatweetup #sed2011

The pace was very fast as we moved through the activities. Educator Dr. Steve Williams described Galileo’s observations of the Sun some 400 years ago, and showed copies of his original drawings, which are in the Smithsonian collection. Participants were able to touch a 4.6 billion year old Allende meteorite, leftover debris from the formation of the solar system. Astronomy curator Dr. David DeVorkin talked about telescopic observations of the Sun made from the Skylab Orbital Workshop in the 1970s, and the legacy of Skylab’s Apollo Telescope Mount in today’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Planetary geologist Sharon Wilson Purdy described her work on the Mars HiRISE mission and explained the role of the Sun in studying seasonal and global climate change on Mars. Tweeps got a chance to view the Sun through three different telescopes outside by our Public Observatory.  The forecast had been for cloudy skies all week, so we were relieved when Saturday came and the skies were clear. The viewing of sun spots and solar prominences was great!  Our three astronomy educators Katie Moore, Erin Braswell, and Shelley Witte, and volunteer Heather Goss, were all on hand to answer questions.  Tweeps were excited to learn one of the telescopes they were looking through was a real Dobsonian telescope built by amateur astronomer John Dobson in 1988. Everyone was tweeting the experience and sharing photos using the #sed2011 and #NASATweetup hash tags.

RT @chaalz: Just touched a rock that was created before our solar system was created. #NASATweetup #SED2011

A Tweetup participant views the Sun through an original Dobsonian telescope. Photo by Todd Stowell.

RT: @pilotconway: Saw some sun spots. So cool. #sed2011 #nasatweetup

A Tweetup participant looks at the Sun (safely) through a solar safe telescope at our Public Observatory. Photo by Camilla Corona SDO.

Tweetup participants could view solar prominences through two telescopes. This image of the Sun's chromosphere was taken through one of the telescopes at the Public Observatory that day. Image by Shelley Witte.

Last but not least, tweeps took a quick tour of Museum highlights led by our knowledgeable volunteer docents, many of whom are pilots, engineers, or scientists and have had amazing careers in the aviation and space industry. Days before the event, I told them not to worry if the group was looking down at their phones a lot; it just means they’re telling everyone about the cool things they’re learning on their tours!  Participants saw objects representing early powered flight to landing humans on the Moon and beyond, including the 1903 Wright Flyer, Spirit of St. Louis, Moon rock, Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia, and SpaceShipOne.

RT @CG____: Amazing. Only 66 years elapsed between Wright Bros flight and landing on the moon. #NASATweetup @airandspace

RT @adcunningham: Do you want to inspire a kid today? Bring him/her to @airandspace #sed2011 #nastweetup

All of the Tweetup participants were friendly and fun, but I have to say I have a particular fondness for NASA SDO’s BFF Camilla Corona SDO (aka @Camilla_SDO). She was a big hit with tweeps and visitors alike, posing beside many of our most famous objects and tweeting photos and fun historical facts.

Camilla gets ready for a showing of "3D Sun" in the Museum's IMAX theater. Photo by Todd Stowell.

Camilla checks out sun spots on the monitor connected to one of the telescopes at the Public Observatory. Photo by Camilla Corona SDO.

Camilla enjoys the "Space Race" exhibition. Photo by Camilla Corona SDO.

Camilla examines the Moon rock that visitors can touch (rubber chickens too, if they could reach). Photo by Todd Stowell.

The entire morning was buzzing with excitement. There was plenty of sharing going on, not just among the Tweetup participants, but also via @NASA and others who were following on Twitter.  So much so that at one point, we discovered, @airandspace and @Camilla_SDO were trending on Twitter in the DC region. In the end, we all had a great time, learned and shared a lot, and we made a lot of new friends. Before the Tweetup group left to return to NASA Goddard, they posed for a photo outside the Museum.

NASA Goddard Sun Earth Day Tweetup participants and Smithsonian hosts. Photo by Mark Avino.

RT @Smithsonian: Group photo of super fun tweeps who came to @airandspace for the #sed2011 #NASATweetup. Enjoy @nasagoddard! http://ow.ly/i/9kRx

RT @bsettlemyer‎ My fave was probably the solar telescopes. But the description of galileo telescope and drawing was interesting too. #NASATweetup #SED2011

Sarah Banks and I were also able to attend the NASA Goddard portion of the Tweetup, where participants watched a NASA EDGE webcast and toured the NASA Goddard facilities, meeting many of the scientists and engineers working on missions like Solar Dynamics Observatory (@NASA_SDO), Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (@LRO_NASA) and more.  The NASA Goddard team produced an amazing event and we were so glad to be a part of it.

What’s next? I’m eager to see the Smithsonian host Tweetups to engage more directly with Twitter followers and provide some great behind-the-scenes access to our experts and collections. My Tweetup co-host Isabel and I are actively planning an official Tweetup at the National Air and Space Museum. Stay tuned and follow @airandspace on Twitter for more info!  Also, look for the Public Observatory to start tweeting soon!

Would you like to participate in a National Air and Space Museum Tweetup?  What would you like to see?  Help us plan by sharing your thoughts!

Vicki Portway is Chair of the Web & New Media Division in Collections and Curatorial Affairs at the National Air and Space Museum.

Try Out our New Online Activities

Published by Tim Grove on February 3, 2011 in Aviation, Behind The Scenes, Education, Exhibitions, On View at the Museum, Stories and Web & New Media.
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If you’re looking for some online fun, try out several Web activities from our newest exhibition, The Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight Gallery.

The exhibition introduces some of the colorful aviation personalities from the 1920s and 1930s.

Tingmissartoq Interactive

"Tingmissartoq" Interactive

  • Help Charles and Anne Lindbergh pack for a trip across several continents in their airplane the Tingmissartoq.  The plane can only carry 6,105 pounds, so you must choose supplies carefully.  You need to anticipate possible emergency scenarios like landing on the icecap of Greenland or landing in the middle of the ocean.  You will be going from cold, icy climates to tropical climates and will be visiting remote Eskimo villages and fancy diplomatic receptions.  You can compare your decisions with what the Lindberghs really packed.
douglas world cruiser interactive

Douglas "World Cruiser" Interactive

  • Plan a flight around the world for the U.S. Army – it’s 1924 and no one has flown around the world before.  First, you must figure out the logistics – which countries will welcome you and where will you be able to refuel?  Your planes can only fly so many miles before needing to refuel. Next you must adapt the airplane for the trip. Your Douglas DT-2 torpedo bomber needs to meet the demands of your journey.  Finally, while you may have tried to plan for the unexpected, you encounter the unexpected anyway.  Face six crises that the real World Cruiser crews encountered – will you make the same decisions they made?
design an air racer interactive

Design an Air Racer Interactive

  • Design an air racer.  You are entering the air races and want to win!  Design a racer that will be the fastest sea plane and will help you win the prestigious Schneider trophy.  Or, design a land plane and win the Pulitzer trophy. Will you make risky decisions and try some of the latest technology or will you play it safe?
Tuskegee Airmen Interactive

Tuskegee Airmen Interactive

  • Fly a bomber escort mission as flight leader of the 332nd Fighter Group in Italy.  World War II is raging and the Tuskegee Airmen are gaining a reputation as top-notch aviators.  As an all African-American group, they must constantly prove their skills.  The American military is segregated and the group’s reputation lies on the decisions of each of its members.  Wrong decisions could cost lives and equipment, and damage the reputation.  Will you make the right decisions and prove that you have the skills required to fly with the best?

A lot of effort and careful research went into each one of these activities.  We first generated a list of possible ideas. We narrowed the list by asking which ideas make the best use of the technology to teach specific content.  We hired a Web developer to help us.   The interactives need to be thoughtfully integrated into the surrounding exhibition content.  After we decided on the scenarios, we did some additional research.  We had to track down photos of the World Cruiser flight and film footage of the Lindberghs.  Our photographer took photos of objects in the collections – we wanted to display some of the interesting items that the Lindberghs packed on their trip.  These objects had not been on display before.  In some cases we also consulted with outside experts, including some of the Tuskegee Airmen themselves! What were the main decisions made by flight leaders on escort missions?  What happened when things didn’t go well?

Once our designer had a prototype activity, we took it onto the floor and asked our visitors to test it.  Some of the interactives, the Lindbergh one for example, went through major design changes.  We wanted to ensure that people find them engaging and easy to complete.  Do they take the right amount of time or are they too complicated?  Will they attract the right age groups?  We also tested the activities with some of our toughest critics, our National Air and Space Museum colleagues.  They all had an opportunity to weigh in on the activities.  When we completed usability testing and made sure visitors were getting the messages we wanted to convey, we went into final production.

So give them a try and let us know what you think.  Which did you like the best?  Did you learn anything new? And, if you have a chance to visit the Museum, please be sure to view the Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight Gallery.

Tim Grove is Chief of Education at the National Air and Space Museum’s Mall building.

Going Mobile

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on March 26, 2010 in Behind The Scenes and Web & New Media.
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The National Air and Space Museum is testing a new mobile website—the first at the Smithsonian!  Visitors carrying web-enabled smartphones can now access basic information about the Museum, daily events, exhibits and find objects on display through this new site formatted for mobile devices. Visit http://mobile.nasm.si.edu to give it a try.

Mobile internet use is rapidly on the rise and experts predict mobile devices will be the primary way humans access the internet by 2020 (See: The Future of the Internet III, Pew Internet & American Life Project).  We are currently working on a redesign of the Air and Space Museum’s web site and our plans include reaching this growing mobile audience.  As we create content for the web, we want to plan for audiences accessing that content in multiple ways, whether from a desktop PC, Blackberry, iPad or other devices in the future.  Most importantly, this test allows us to solicit feedback from our audience in the early stages.  You can help determine which direction we go from here!

For this first effort, we decided to keep things very simple.  We narrowed the target audience to visitors on-site at the Museum or those planning a visit.   We realize visitors who are not coming to the Museum deserve mobile web, too, so we plan to cater to a broader audience in successive versions.   At this point, the mobile web site has just the basics: hours and location, directions, daily events and movie schedules, exhibitions, and objects on display. It is not a multimedia tour (yet), but is meant to provide useful information from our web site in a format tailored to a mobile audience.  One of the most frequently asked questions from visitors coming to the Welcome Center are about where things are, so we developed a mobile guide to “Objects on Display.”  Visitors can search by object name and find where an object is located in either the National Mall Building or the Udvar-Hazy Center.   We also added maps to this feature that we plan to incorporate into the main web site.  This is just one of several examples where our work on the mobile site is feeding back into improvements for our regular web presence.

Instead of creating a specialized app, we decided a mobile web site built in-house would serve more visitors, be faster to implement and be more flexible to change. We did build and test the site primarily on the iPhone, so we are looking forward to getting feedback on any technical issues while viewing the site on other mobile devices.

What would you like to see in a National Air and Space Museum mobile experience? We have lofty plans for the future, including more Museum content like videos and tours.  We are most excited about features that will allow you to control and personalize your own experience: from bookmarking, adding recommendations, and remixing collections to contributing your own content, comments, or asking questions.  We hope you will give the mobile site a try and let us know what you think!

Please note that cellular service can be spotty at the Udvar-Hazy Center.  We hope this will improve in the near future.

To learn more about what the Smithsonian is doing with mobile, please visit the Smithsonian Web & New Media Strategy public wiki site at http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Mobile. For more information about what other museums are doing and planning with mobile, please visit “Museums To Go” at http://wiki.museummobile.info/museums-to-go.

Vicki Portway is Chair of Web & New Media at the National Air and Space Museum.

The Saga of Lunar Landscape

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on January 22, 2010 in Behind The Scenes, Hidden Treasures, Highlights from the Collection, History, Stories and Web & New Media.
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For more than a decade it has been my privilege, among my other duties, to serve as curator of the National Air and Space Museum art collection. It comes as a surprise to many folks to realize that the Museum has an art collection. In fact, it includes over 4,700 works by artists with names like Daumier, Goya, Rauschenberg, Rockwell and Wyeth, and is perhaps the finest and best-rounded collection of aerospace-themed art held by any of the world’s museums. People who are aware that I manage the Museum’s art treasures occasionally ask if I have a favorite work in the collection, I do.

"Lunar Landscape" by Chesley Bonestell. Reproduced courtesy of Private Collection

Chesley Bonestell’s mural, Lunar Landscape, was unveiled at the Boston Science Museum’s Haydon Planetarium on March 28, 1957. “No spaceship reservations are needed for a startlingly realistic visit to the Moon” announced a museum press release.  Measuring forty feet long by ten feet tall, the dramatic panorama of the lunar surface was the masterwork of an artist who had done more than his fair share to set the stage for the coming of the Space Age.

Born in 1888, Chesley Bonestell grew up on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, and survived the 1906 earthquake to emerge as a leading American architectural designer. Having left his artistic fingerprints on some of the best known structures of the era, including the façade of the Chrysler Building, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Golden Gate Bridge, he moved on to Hollywood, where his matte paintings provided the stunning backgrounds for such films as, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), and The Magnificent Ambersons. (1942).

Chesley Bonestell. Portrait by Ansel Adams, Gift of Pip and Frederick C. Durant, III

Always fascinated by astronomy, Bonestell began combining the best available science with his own artistry to produce paintings of the surface of other worlds. Life magazine published a spread of the artist’s extraterrestrial scenes in its issue of May 29, 1944. The editors of Mechanix Illustrated introduced their readers to Bonestell’s notion of a “Moon Rocket” in September 1945. In 1949, he collaborated with writer Willy Ley to produce the beautifully illustrated book, Conquest of Space. The next year, Bonestell teamed with producer George Pal and science fiction writer Robert Heinlein to create a classic space flight film, Destination Moon (1950). The artist contributed illustrations to a series of eight Colliers magazine articles on space flight that began to appear in the spring of 1952, and to the books describing flights to the Moon and Mars that spun out of the magazine series. A generation of youngsters, myself among them, nursed dreams of interplanetary travel inspired by Chesley Bonestell’s dramatic visions of other worlds.

Bonestell was at the peak of his powers in 1956, when the Boston Museum of Science commissioned Lunar Landscape, a work on canvas that would take up an entire wall near the planetarium. As in the case of all of his paintings, the artist planned the mural in meticulous detail. He positioned the viewer on a spot 1300 feet up the south wall of an imaginary lunar crater (“similar to Albateguius, but smaller”), located seven degrees from the Moon’s North Pole and five degrees to the left of the center of the lunar disc. He went so far as to specify that it was 3 o’clock, Boston time, on a late June afternoon, and calculated the position of the planets and stars accordingly (Jupiter over the central peaks, Antares below and to the right of the Earth).

Continue reading ‘The Saga of Lunar Landscape’

Another First for The Museum – Virtual Conferences

Published by Tim Grove on November 3, 2009 in History, News & Events, space and Web & New Media.
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Astronaut John W. Young, commander of the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission, jumps up from the lunar surface as he salutes the U.S. Flag during the first Apollo 16 extravehicular activity (EVA). NASA Image #GPN-2000-001131

The National Air and Space Museum is holding its first ever virtual conference for educators on Tuesday, November 10 from 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. EST.   Since we’re in the middle of the 40th anniversary commemorations of the Apollo missions, we decided to focus on this important period in American history.  Staff from our Division of Space History will discuss some fascinating topics such as the real story behind President Kennedy’s famous speech challenging Congress to send Americans to the Moon;  the role of computers—a new technology in the 1960s; the myth of presidential leadership during this time period; the intersections of Ralph Abernathy, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Moon landing; the rise of six iconic Apollo images and how they have been used over time; and the denials of the Moon landings by a small segment of the population and their evolution since the 1960s.  They will also explain the complexity behind the Saturn Rocket, the Command, Service, and Lunar Modules and the technique of Lunar-Orbital Rendezvous.   Museum educators will provide tips for helping students analyze primary source materials. The program will support the NASA History Advanced Placement and Human Geography Advanced Placement projects and is generously funded by NASA.

As an added bonus, Apollo astronaut John Young graciously agreed to record a special invitation to participate in the conference and answered some of our questions about his experiences in space.

New to virtual conferencing? A virtual or online conference is similar to other professional conferences only you access it online. Registration is free and open to everyone. And since we know people are busy and the conference schedule will not be convenient for everyone interested, all the conference sessions are recorded and archived so you can play them at any time.

Whether you’re an educator or not, we invite you to join us for this free event.  And, help us spread the word!

Visit the Smithsonian Virtual Conference web site for more information and to register.

Tim Grove is an education specialist in the National Air and Space Museum’s Education Division.

Fly Now! Making the National Air and Space Museum's Poster Collection Accessible, Online

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on October 17, 2009 in Aviation, Behind The Scenes, Hidden Treasures, Highlights from the Collection and Web & New Media.
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As mentioned in Dom Pisano’s recent post “From Collecting to Curating,” six interns, including myself, and two volunteers (with our supervisor, enough for a baseball team!) photographed, scanned and catalogued much of the museum’s collection of over 1,300 posters at the Paul E. Garber Facility‘s collections processing unit this summer. It sounds like a lot of posters, but you may not have seen any of them, unless you have a great memory of advertisements you glimpsed in airports over the years while running to catch your plane. Selections from the posters have been published, but the collection is now receiving the “full treatment” by museum staff, interns, and volunteers.

Intern Mark Leadenham prepares to examine posters with a microscope to determine what printing method was used. Photo by Amelia Kile.

Intern Katy Osterwald measures and cuts archival folders to appropriate sizes for housing the posters. Photo by Carl Bobrow.

This marks the first time the poster collection, which includes graphic art published from as early as 1827 up to the twenty-first century, has been accessible to the public as an archive, since the majority of it has remained in storage in Suitland, Maryland. The collection provides a wealth of information related to balloons, early flight, military and commercial aviation, and space flight, documenting aerospace history and technology while providing a window into popular culture. As a student of art history, I found the collection visually engaging and historically significant. As a young museum professional, I gained experience physically working with the objects, recording and organizing information, photographing, identifying methods used to print the posters, and even had a lot of fun!

The “Artbox,” where the unframed art is stored, before the new storage cabinets are installed. Photo by Katy Osterwald.

Contractors, volunteers and interns install all the shiny new cabinets in 3 hours. Thanks everyone! Photo by Ben Sullivan.

Now that the collection is online, scholars will be able to contribute to knowledge, study and discussion of this valuable resource. Working hands-on within a collection that was not accessible to many people, the group working on the project developed the feeling that this was “our” collection in a sense, and it is a thrill to now be able to share it. It is a diverse collection, wide-ranging in terms of subject, country of origin and time period, and thus it will make an excellent educational tool. Photographing and documenting the posters was part of a larger, ongoing effort to provide images and relevant information about the National Air and Space Museum’s art collection to the public, all while preparing the collections to move to the new Phase Two Collection Storage Facility at the Steve F. Udvar-Hazy Center. So, take a look at the collection and tell us what you think!

Amelia Brakeman Kile is an intern in the Collections Processing Unit at the National Air and Space Museum’s Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility.

From Collecting to Curating

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on September 14, 2009 in Aviation, Behind The Scenes, Highlights from the Collection and Web & New Media.
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The Museum-going public doesn’t often get the opportunity to observe the work that goes on behind the scenes in a museum. The National Air and Space Museum’s poster collection is a case in point. The items in this collection, which range from notices for early aviation exhibitions to commercial airline advertising, were collected over many years. It is only recently, however, that the posters have been curated; i.e., cared for as a collection.
In the early 1990s, Aeronautics Division curator Joanne Gernstein (now London) began to take an active interest in the poster collection. She consulted with a paper conservator at the Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute, and carried out the necessary preservation measures. She sought out suitable storage at the Paul E.Garber facility. She also had the collection photographed, with an eye toward eventual display online, but also to provide reference images for the collections database. She curated an exhibition, titled Fly Now! Aviation Posters from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, that traveled around the country. She also wrote a companion book, Fly Now! Aviation Posters from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, which was published by the National Geographic Society in 2007.

A typical post-World War II airline poster by commercial artist Frank J. Soltesz depicts the large and distinctive triple-tail section of a TWA Super Lockheed Constellation in a striking and colorful pose, circa 1952. In the pre-commercial jet transportation era, the airlines often used aircraft as the central image in their posters and emphasized the safety and reliability of commercial flight. With the introduction of commercial jets in the late 1950s, airline advertising began to change. Aircraft were nowhere to be seen. Instead, images of relatively easy travel to distant and exotic places were the norm.

After Joanne left the National Air and Space Museum in 2008, I took over the collection. Working with Collections Processing Unit (CPU) staff, volunteers and interns, I have attempted to continue Joanne’s pioneering efforts. A longtime Museum volunteer, Ted Hamady, has been working on a subject category reclassification, which should make searching the collection easier. Meanwhile, CPU staff members Carl Bobrow and Samantha Snell have received substantial grants to rationalize the collection, provide better storage and housing for it, and prepare it for its eventual move to new collections care facilities in Phase Two of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. In the most recent behind-the scenes effort, CPU summer interns Katy Osterwald, Hannah Soh, Amelia Kile, Allison Smith, Jeff Nagel, Mark Leadenham, Rachel Goddard, and Carolyn Metcalf worked on a variety of tasks geared toward bring this collection to the public. The result: 600+ posters are now available for public access on the National Air and Space Museum website. Eventually, we hope to place the entire collection of some 1300+ posters online.

Dom Pisano is a curator in the Aeronautics Division at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

One Way Museum Visitors Help Develop Exhibitions

Published by Tim Grove on July 22, 2009 in Behind The Scenes, Exhibitions, space and Web & New Media.
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A Museum evaluator talks with visitors as they try a new interactive.

Last week we began evaluating the first of four new computer interactives that will go into the upcoming “Moving Beyond Earth” exhibition. Visitors got to test their space knowledge with a simulation of Space Flight Academy, a quiz format that will allow up to fifteen people to play at a time. Over the next month we will give visitors the opportunity to help us test three more interactives: one is a multi-touch table where six people at a time will gather around and design their own space station modules; one allows the visitor to play the role of flight director in a real-life mission scenario; and one matches a visitor’s interests and skills with several fascinating jobs in the space industry.

Visitors try out a new interactive still in development.

Most Museum visitors don’t realize how much work goes into each and every interactive component in an exhibition. Whether it’s mechanical or computer-based, an interactive must have several qualities:
• It must be engaging – visitors must want to do it
• It must have an educational point – yes, we want our visitors to learn!
• It must complement and support the major themes of the exhibition around it
• It must be easy to understand – if visitors are confused they won’t complete it
• It must withstand the use and abuse of millions of hands per year – we don’t want it to be broken constantly

At the National Air and Space Museum, interactives are often designed completely in-house, but sometimes we hire help from the outside. In either case the process combines a tremendous amount of creative energy with accurate and well-researched content. Once we have a solid idea, we then ask our incredibly talented production staff to come up with a plan to build it.  Sometimes they come up with the brilliant ideas.

Other interactives in the works will give visitors an opportunity to accompany the Tuskegee Airmen on a mission over Germany, to help Charles and Anne Lindbergh pack for their flight on the Tingmissartoq, to arrange logistics for the Douglas World Cruisers’ round-the-world-flight, and to design an airplane so it will be competitive in the air races. Another one will allow visitors to decode a Morse code message, explaining the process of sending and receiving messages as Anne Lindbergh did as radio operator for her husband’s exploratory flights on the Tingmissartoq.

Interactives make any exhibition a more active experience, and we couldn’t develop them without the opinions of our visitors who agree to test the prototypes. If you visit the Museum and someone asks you to try an interactive, help us out! We want your input!

Tim Grove is acting Chief of Education at the National Air and Space Museum’s building on the National Mall.

It's All About You and Kites

Published by The National Air and Space Museum on March 24, 2009 in News & Events and Web & New Media.
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Young visitor designs her very own kite at the Kites Family Day. SI2008-2793Every year, the Smithsonian holds a huge Kite Festival on the National Mall.  The weekend prior to the festival, the National Air and Space Museum has a Kite Family Day where kids and their families can make their own kites, learn how to fly them, and watch indoor kite flying demonstrations.

I often search the web to find out what visitors are filming, photographing, blogging and tweeting about the Museum.  I found lots of images and videos of the outdoor Kite Festival, but one of our educators found this great YouTube video which captures the fun of the indoor Kite Family Day in 2008.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlrZb0LPD1o]

We are so glad our friends at Wings Over Washington created this!

Did you attend the Kite Family Day or the Smithsonian Kite Festival this year?  Leave a comment and tell us about it!

P.S. Keep sharing your thoughts about the National Air and Space Museum using your favorite social media outlet. We just might blog about it!

Vicki Portway is head of Web & New Media at the National Air and Space Museum.