Blog posts tagged collection

Shared vector embeddings updates

There is a lot of ground to cover in this blog post: The Met publishing their own vector embeddings, SFO Museum publishing 1152-dimension vector embeddings for its images, SFO Museum producing 1152-dimension vector embeddings for NGA and MoMA, and a whole bunch of updates to the tooling used to generate and query vector embeddings targeting local-first and consumer-grade hardware.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on May 27, 2026 and tagged roboteyes, machine-learning, collection, duckdb, golang, parquet, bleve, embeddings, aws, s3 and s3vectors.

OEmbeddings - What is the least amount of metadata necessary for shared vector embeddings?

This is a blog post describing a proposal for a set of common attributes to include with shared vector embeddings. These common attributes are meant to be the least amount of metadata necessary to provide a simple preview and suitable attribution for the item (an image or text) for which vector embeddings have been produced.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on April 15, 2026 and tagged roboteyes, machine-learning, collection, oembeddings, embeddings, golang and parquet.

Shared cross-institutional vector embeddings – how we might get there

We are proposing a simple‑is‑best approach to sharing vector embeddings of our collections, a step that moves us closer to realizing the long‑standing ‘holy grail’ of cross‑institutional collections search through vector‑based image similarity.”

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on April 06, 2026 and tagged roboteyes, machine-learning, collection, duckdb, golang, parquet and embeddings.

Updates (and additions) to machine-learning tools running on consumer hardware

These are not “silver bullet” tools. Rather, they endeavour to be part of a set of building blocks for creating an infrastructure that preserves and guarantees the cultural heritage sector some agency in our work.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on February 10, 2026 and tagged swift, roboteyes, machine-learning, collection, duckdb, golang and embeddings.

Similar object images derived using the MobileCLIP computer-vision models

Like a lot of things involving machine-learning, the image similarity results while not always right aren’t necessarily wrong either. In the same vein as searching collections by color this “fuzzy” and imprecise space presents a whole new avenue for browsing collections and making visible objects that would otherwise get lost in the crowd.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on January 09, 2026 and tagged swift, roboteyes, machine-learning, collection, mobileclip and embeddings.

Searching the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website by color

The search-by-color functionality works by taking an input color, represented as a hexidecimal string, and then “snapping” it to its nearest match on a fixed palette of colors. The RGB color space contains over 16 million individual colors so searching for exact matches will usually yield too few results to make searching by color useful. By “bucketing” all those millions of colors in to a fixed set of a couple of hundred colors, a “palette”, things start to get interesting.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on June 16, 2025 and tagged collection, search, color, api and webassembly.

Holding Hands with the “Fediverse” – ActivityPub at SFO Museum

SFO Museum has joined the “Fediverse”. We have begun to operate a series of automated “bot” accounts that are published using the ActivityPub protocols which 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.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on March 12, 2024 and tagged collection, activitypub, socialmedia and golang.

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.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on January 22, 2024 and tagged collection and shoebox.

Coloring Books Pages For the SFO Museum Aviation Collection

We 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”.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on December 18, 2023 and tagged collection, rustlang, golang, roboteyes, publications and coloringbooks.