Updates to the SFO Museum shoebox

This is a blog post by aaron cope that was published on December 05, 2024 . It was tagged shoebox, flightdata, instagram and socialmedia.

Lunch box: China Clipper. Metal, paint. Gift of Jon E. Krupnick, SFO Museum Collection. 2022.124.803

Earlier this year we announced the SFO Museum Aviation Collection Website Shoebox. In the blog post introducing the shoebox I wrote:

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.

Today we are announcing two changes to the shoebox:

  1. The “shoebox” itself has been moved to the newly created you.sfomuseum.org website.
  2. It is now possible to add individual flights and Instagram posts, in addition to collection objects, to your shoebox.

Collection objects can still be added to (or removed from) your shoebox from the collection website itself. The only change is that the list of all the things you’ve collected now lives on the you.sfomuseum.org website. We made this change to reflect the idea that the shoebox is not specific to the Aviation Collection. Going forward the you.sfomuseum.org website is where all the things that you’ve saved, or created, involving SFO Museum will live.

For example, the ability to save individual flights in and out of SFO and Instagram posts from the Mills Field website. Saving these items works exactly the same way saving collection objects works: Simply click the shoebox icon next to the item you want to save and it will be added to your shoebox.

The goal is to slowly (and then quickly) add the ability to save any of the “first class actors” involved with the SFO Museum websites to your shoebox: Twitter posts, individual terminals and gates, airlines, aircraft and airports. Anything, really. Flights and Instagram posts are just what we’ve started with and what we’re using to make sure everything works.

For the time being, shoebox items are still only viewable by the person who added them. You can’t see my shoebox items and I can’t see yours. Eventually (soon, I hope) you will be able to organize shoebox items in to named “sets” and once that is possible we’ll add the ability to make those sets and the objects contained in them public so you can share them with others.

Luggage label: Panair do Brasil. Paper, ink, adhesive. Gift of the Captain John B. Russell Family, SFO Museum Collection. 2012.149.1234

Speaking of Instagram last week we created a new @instagram@collection.sfomuseum.org ActivityPub account. Every day it will randomly republish one of the over 5,000 posts that SFO Museum has published to Instagram over the years which is a great way to see the depth and the breadth of the museum’s programming and our social media manager Bao’s work sharing those efforts (and save them to your shoebox).

Note: The launch of this account happily coincides with the recent Threads announcement to allow the following of accounts on other “Fediverse” servers from the Threads application. It’s still not as obvious as it should be, even to people like me who live and breathe this stuff. Which is to say that it’s not clear to me whether its possible to find the SFO Museum ActivityPub accounts accounts from the Threads app yet but hopefully that will happen soon.