https://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/Mills Field – a weblog from SFO Museum2024-03-12T13:35:38-07:00SFO MuseumWe do everything ourselves at the museum, from curatorial to registration to exhibition design and installation and now digital. The goal of this weblog is to be a place where everyone at the museum can share their work and the motivations that guide that work, and inform what you see at the airport. Some of it will be tangible and immediate, some of it may be shop-talk, and some of it may be speculative and aspirational. We hope that all of it will be interesting and give you a reason to discover a little more of the museum the next time you’re at the airport or visiting us online.Holding Hands with the "Fediverse" – ActivityPub at SFO Museumhttps://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2024/03/12/activitypub/2024-03-122024-03-12SFO Museum has joined the “Fediverse”. We have begun to operate a series of automated “bot” accounts that are published using the ActivityPub protocols and that can be subscribed to from any client, like Mastodon, that supports those standards. These are automated, low-frequency, accounts and they currently only support a limited set of interactions: Accounts can be followed or unfollowed, individual posts can be “liked”, “boosted” or replied to but those replies will not be answered (yet) or published on the SFO Museum websites. To get started we’ve created three “groups” of accounts: Things which have happened recently involving the SFO Museum Aviation Collection; Things which have happened in the terminals (new and old) and; Things from the collection which are related to flights in and out of SFO.The SFO Museum Aviation Collection Website Shoeboxhttps://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2024/01/22/shoebox/2024-01-222024-01-22This 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.Coloring Books Pages For the SFO Museum Aviation Collectionhttps://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2023/12/18/coloringbook/2023-12-182023-12-18We have launched a new experimental feature on the SFO Museum Aviation Website: Coloring book pages (or sheets) for a subset of the objects in our collection. Coloring books are PDF files with a stylized, black and white outline of an object for you to print out and color as you see fit and can be thought of as a second attempt at producing a museum artifact that can follow you “out of the building”.Experiments in Photogrammetryhttps://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2023/11/29/3d/2023-11-292023-11-29This is a blog post about using consumer-grade hardware and a suite of open-source software tools to generate high-quality 3D models from photographic imagery, a process commonly referred to as "photogrammetry", which can be viewed and interacted within a web browser. This is a fairly technical blog post but the non-technical takeaways are: It's possible, it's affordable or at least meaningfully cheaper than it used to be, it's harder than it should be, we have developed tooling to make things easier and we would love your help to make it all better.Extracting Subjects from Images in Swift (and gRPC)https://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2023/10/31/image-emboss/2023-10-312023-10-31In the Searching Text in Images on the Aviation Collection Website blog post I introduced the swift-text-emboss Swift package, a wrapper library around Apple’s Vision Framework to simplify extracting text from images. In this blog I’d like to introduce the swift-image-emboss Swift package. Like the swift-text-emboss package this is also a wrapper around code provided by Apple’s Vision Framework with the goal simplifying the code necessary to extract, or “lift”, one or more subjects from an image.Searching Text in Images on the Aviation Collection Websitehttps://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2023/09/14/image-text-search/2023-09-142023-09-14We want to see what these technologies make possible, though, and a very real and immediate opportunity is the ability to index search terms that the curators and registrars haven't already included in the titles or descriptions for objects in our collection. For example, this travel bag from Canadian Pacific Airlines, covered in the names of cities the airline traveled to, is not included in the search results for the terms "montreal" or "saskatoon" using the default search functionality but it’s the first result when we also search for the text in images.Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - Past Galleries (and Exhibitions) Along a Routehttps://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2023/09/12/wayfinding-past-galleries/2023-09-122023-09-12Not all past exhibitions in past galleries displayed along a route in the SFO Museum Wayfinding system have studio-quality photographs of their objects but for many of those exhibitions we have “installation” photos and those will be integrated in to the Wayfinding system shortly.Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - Past exhibitions for galleries along a routehttps://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2023/08/16/wayfinding-past/2023-08-162023-08-16SFO Museum has been producing exhibitions since 1980 and if people sometimes have trouble wrapping their heads around what’s on display today it’s easy to imagine that most people have no idea what we’ve done in the past (and that we’ve been doing it for over 40 years). By including past exhibitions in wayfinding routes and publications we’re hoping to show people not only all the cool and interesting stuff we’ve displayed over the years but also the breadth and velocity of that work to help reenforce the idea that “the airport is the museum”.Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - EPUB (ebook) publicationshttps://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2023/07/10/wayfinding-epub/2023-07-102023-07-10This is a short blog post to announce that we have enabled support for generating publications of all the SFO Museum galleries and exhibitions and public art works from the San Francisco Arts Commission along a wayfinding route as EPUB documents.Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - Interface changes, WebShare and Nearbyhttps://millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2023/07/03/wayfinding-nearby/2023-07-032023-07-03Since the last blog post about adding custom publications for wayfinding routes we’ve made the following changes and improvements: Lists and thumbnail views for route steps, galleries and public art works along a route and objects from the SFO Museum Aviation Collection related to a flights; When supported by the browser the Web Share API has been enabled for linking to (and sharing) individual routes; The new “nearby” feature allows you to find galleries, public art works and other waypoints close to arbitrary points inside the SFO terminal complex.