Tag Archives: web

Jumping In Tweet First

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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

 

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

 

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.

Going Mobile

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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.

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

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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.