Experience

Visit the Museum from Home: Explore Our Digital Collection!

Seeing and appreciating our aircraft and artifacts in person is an experience like no other at The Museum of Flight. But there’s even bigger treasure trove of aviation and space history you can explore from your own home. A brief word of warning: once you start looking, it’s hard to stop! 

It’s the Museum’s newly revamped Digital Collections website featuring digitized materials from our archival, library and artifact collections. Search and browse historical photographs, letters, journals, flight logs, oral histories – so much to see that a quick glance can turn into a couple of hours.  

One of the goals of our new Limitless campaign is to increase access to and awareness of The Museum of Flight’s collection. The first step was finding a new content management system called Recollect. 

“The first iteration of our Digital Collections site was launched in 2017 and, at the time, primarily showcased our World War I materials and our oral histories with American Fighter Aces. It was a solid resource containing over 5,000 photographs and documents and almost 200 hours of digitized audio, but we were just getting started!” explained Digital Asset Coordinator Ali Lane. 

By the beginning of 2025, the site boasted a whopping 25,000 digital records, a colossal amount of data that caused the site to frequently crash. Lane said the Collections team consulted with data experts in the field and ultimately chose Recollect for its new web platform as it could handle the Museum’s ever-growing collection. 

“Honestly, Recollect has been such a dream this past year,” said Lane. “Now that we have all of our files and records in one, functional platform, we’ve been able to speed up our digitization efforts so we’re uploading more materials more quickly to the site.”  

With Recollect handling all the heavy lifting on the back end, Lane says the Collections team and volunteers have more time to research and catalogue the Museum’s materials. For example, a historic photograph showing a plane might have been labeled as an unidentified aircraft before. Now, staff can research the aircraft, list where the photo was taken, even add the aircraft’s tail and wing numbers.  

“This is the real meat and potatoes of Collections works,” said Lane. “I hope through the Limitless campaign that even more people will get to experience and explore the site and the many, many treasures in our amazing collection. I guarantee you’ll find something new each time you visit the site — I find new stuff every day even after almost 10 years here!” said Lane.