The SFO Museum Aviation Collection Website Shoebox

This is a blog post about something that’s been hiding in plain sight on the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website for over a month now: The ability to save collection objects to a personal “shoebox”. If that sounds like a simple bookmarking system limited to items in the SFO Museum collection that’s because it is. For now. The shoebox and the introduction of user accounts are the first steps, the first building blocks, towards developing more sophisticated functionality and applications for the museum and its collection.

Step one are user accounts which allow the collection website to distinguish one person from another. Thet SFO Museum Aviation Collection website uses light-weight user accounts that only require an email address and no other personal information to sign in. After you enter your email address we’ll send you a “magic link” that will log you in to the website. That’s it. Your email address will not be used for any other purposes and we won’t share it with any third parties. User accounts are governed by the SFO Museum Terms of Service and Community Guidelines documents.

Step two is the “shoebox” or, more specifically, the ability to save something related to the SFO Museum Aviation Collection to your account. The easiest thing to start with are individual objects so that’s what we’ve done. To save an object to your shoebox click on the shoebox icon (which is really just a box icon because there aren’t enough pixels to represent shoes with any kind of fidelity) located underneath an object’s title.

The shoebox icon looks like this: If an object is already in your shoebox then the same icon will appear but it will be black instead of gold, like this:

If you are logged in that’s all you need to do. The object will be saved your shoebox in the background and you can view it, along with all the other things you’ve collected, at:

If you are not already logged in then you’ll be presented with a modal dialog prompting you to login. Clicking the Sign in button will take you to the https://auth.sfomuseum.org website where you’ll be asked to enter your email address.

As mentioned above your email address will not be used for any other purpose than signing you in to the collection website and will not be shared with any third parties. After you’ve submitted your email address you will receive an email message from do-not-reply@sfomuseum.org containing a “magic link” with a time-sensitive access code that will sign you in to the SFO Museum collection website. You can either click on that link or enter the code manually on the auth.sfomuseum.org website. Here’s an example of what one of those email messages will look like:

If you look carefully at the link in the screenshot of the email message above you’ll see that it contains a redirect URL to the page the object was added from and a #add-to-shoebox-{OBJECTID} fragment. That fragment will trigger a new modal dialog requesting confirmation that you really want to add the object to your shoebox.

Adding an object to your shoebox happens in the background. If there’s a problem then you’ll be notified but otherwise you’ll remain on the same page that you added the object from and you can continue doing whatever it is you were doing before collecting that object.

You can see all the objects you’ve added to your shoebox by visiting:

Underneath the “Items in your shoebox” header is a collapsible menu that lists controls for managing the items in your shoebox.

Currently there are controls to export the contents of your shoebox as a comma-separated value (CSV) or a JSON-encoded document and to remove all the items from your shoebox entirely.

Exports will contain the following CSV columns (or JSON properties): id, created, type, status, item_id, item_url, item_title, item_creditline, item_image and are designed to be minimally-viable machine-readable data that can be used to inform more sophisticated applications in advance of a dedicated SFO Museum Application Programming Interface (API) endpoint, discussed below.

“Removing all the items from your shoebox” will, as it says, empty your shoebox entirely. If you want to remove a single object, though, simply click the shoebox icon underneath the object’s title (again). You’ll be prompted to confirm that you want to remove the object and once you do the action will be completed in the background.

That covers the basics of the shoebox. As has been mentioned a few times already the design and implementation of the shoebox is deliberately simple right now. It isn’t anything that couldn’t also be done using your browser’s bookmarking system or a dedicated bookmarking service; both of those are good approaches too. But if you are looking for a dedicated place on the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website to gather and organize the objects that interest you, a place that will expand and improve in time, then the shoebox is here for you to use.

Next Steps

The rest of this blog post talks about some of the features for the shoebox talk we are working on, going forward. These are things that are made possible by the addition of user accounts and idea of a shoebox, however simple its implementation is now. It’s only possible to collect objects today but that doesn’t mean it won’t be possible to collect other things – wayfinding routes, social media posts, coloring book sheets, individual flights to and from SFO and so on – in the future.

Named sets and public shoebox items

Currently individual shoebox items are only viewable by the person who added them. Going forward we plan to add the ability to organize shoebox items in to named sets and add the ability to make both objects and named sets publicly viewable to anyone visiting the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website.

Search and filtering

Likewise there is currently no way to search or filter the items in a shoebox. This is a reflection of our desire to start small, with early releases, layering on advanced functionality as we go. Eventually all the same controls for filtering and navigating results that are provided when you search the entirety of the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website will be made available for individual shoeboxes.

Application Programming Interface (API)

People with a technical bent may have looked “under the hood” at the network traffic for the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website and noticed that there is already an API. Your web browser uses, and has been using, that API for a long time but those communications are gated by access tokens which are specific to the website (and rotated on a regular basis to prevent unaithorized reuse). That will change soon. There is no immediately launch date for a public API yet, largely because it involves some internal “plumbing” changes we want to finish first but it will happen and the plan is for it to happen sooner rather than later.