Museum staff continually work to digitize and catalog the Museum's collection, both for stewardship and to make our collection more accessible to audiences everywhere. In particular, images of historic objects and archival collections help convey the stories of aviation and space and enable a better understanding of their history.  

Photography of our collection ranges from documenting their acquisition, treatment, restoration, and conservation to capturing images of artifacts on display in our exhibitions. We take high-resolution images of objects for internal records and share them with the public online, conduct digital preservation of archival materials, create panoramic tours inside cockpits and artifact interiors, and much more. Working in collaboration with Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office, we are able to digitize historic objects in 3D, such as the Apollo 11 command module and the space shuttle Discovery.

Here are just some of our digitization projects: 

To learn more about some of the museum staff that help digitize collections, visit the Collections Processing Unit, Conservation Unit, Preservation and Restoration Unit, and Registration Unit's about pages.