Most people never think about how museums keep track of what they own.
Visitors see exhibitions, aircraft, artifacts, photographs, and restored objects on display. What they rarely see is the information structure underneath it all — the framework that allows millions of items to be identified, located, preserved, researched, and connected across decades.
When institutions face financial pressure, those systems can begin to look invisible. And invisible infrastructure is often the easiest to question.
Collection management platforms rarely generate obvious revenue on their own. Visitors do not buy tickets to see databases. Because of that, these systems can sometimes be viewed as administrative overhead rather than what they actually are: foundational operational infrastructure.
But once collections reach a certain scale, the alternative is not efficiency. The alternative is fragmentation.
From Card Catalogs to Connected Collections
For many years, museums relied on methods that reflected the realities of their time. Books and magazines were organized through card catalogs. Photographs existed in spreadsheets. Technical manuals were listed in older software later converted into Excel files. Archival collections often had only brief summaries and folder descriptions. Curatorial departments depended heavily on ledgers, donor cards, and paper records.
None of these approaches were wrong when they were created. The challenge was scale.
Over time, collections expanded into millions of items spread across departments, storage spaces, formats, and generations of recordkeeping. Information became scattered between filing cabinets, disconnected databases, spreadsheets, paper files, and institutional memory carried by longtime staff.
At the San Diego Air & Space Museum, the Library & Archives alone contains more than 4 million images, roughly 80 million documents, 40,000 books, 4,000 magazine titles, 15,000 technical manuals, 10,000 drawings, 15,000 reels of film, over 400 personal papers, and 6 corporate records. The curatorial department contains millions of additional objects, even though only a portion had been fully cataloged into earlier platforms.
At that scale, managing collections becomes less about storage and more about relationships between information.
Large museums are not simply managing objects. They are managing connections between photographs, artifacts, technical drawings, donor histories, conservation records, exhibit files, films, archival correspondence, and decades of accumulated research.
A single aircraft photograph may connect to restoration files, maintenance manuals, engineering drawings, donor records, exhibit history, and film footage located across multiple departments. Before integrated systems, finding those connections often depended on searching through separate spreadsheets, paper files, departmental databases, and staff memory.
The Hidden Cost of Fragmentation
One of the biggest changes brought by modern collection systems is time.
Staff no longer have to spend hours reconstructing information that may already exist somewhere else inside the institution. Locating a single item no longer requires checking multiple databases, accession records, paper files, or disconnected spreadsheets simply to determine whether something has already been cataloged, digitized, moved, or researched elsewhere.
The systems do not eliminate the work itself. They reduce duplicated effort.
Large museums already operate with limited staffing, growing backlogs, and increasing preservation demands. When information becomes fragmented, staff time slowly disappears into searching, cross-checking, re-entering data, correcting inconsistencies, and relying on undocumented institutional knowledge. Over years, that inefficiency becomes its own operational burden.
Without reliable infrastructure, museums gradually lose capacity in ways the public rarely sees. Research requests take longer to answer. Exhibit preparation slows. Duplicate work increases. Digitized materials become harder to reconnect to physical collections. Information becomes more difficult to trace across departments. Gradually, institutions spend more energy reconstructing information than building upon it.
These systems also support accountability. Collections constantly move between storage, exhibitions, conservation projects, digitization efforts, loans, and research access. Modern platforms help track locations, document history, and reduce the likelihood of materials becoming separated from their records over time.
The Labor Behind the Systems
Beginning in 2010, the San Diego Air & Space Museum Library & Archives began moving toward more integrated digital platforms. A library system replaced many fragmented cataloging methods. In 2012, the museum established a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) to organize growing digitized image and film collections. The curatorial department also transitioned to a formal collection platform, with volunteers helping enter more standardized records.
The transition did not happen overnight. Much of the work continues today.
What often gets overlooked in conversations about collection systems is the amount of labor already invested in building them.
These efforts required years of grant funding, staff time, volunteer support, scanning, metadata cleanup, migration work, standardization, and ongoing cataloging. Older paper records had to be interpreted, spreadsheets reorganized, terminology aligned, and disconnected records gradually brought into relationship with one another.
That work is never entirely finished. Collections continue to grow. Terminology evolves. Records require correction. Newly digitized materials must still be connected back to historical records created decades earlier.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded three phases of the museum’s collection management initiatives, contributing roughly $700,000 toward the development and integration of modern systems. Additional support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), The Rueben H. Fleet Foundation, The Legler Benbough Foundation, and Wells Fargo helped fund large-scale digitization, digital preservation, and collection access initiatives over multiple years.
Combined, these efforts contributed well over $1.5 million toward digitization and infrastructure projects that enabled the museum to digitize and preserve more than 1 million collection assets while building digital collection management and library systems accessible to researchers and audiences worldwide.
The funding supported far more than software purchases. It supported years of scanning, cataloging, metadata cleanup, migration work, infrastructure development, and the labor required to gradually transform fragmented historical records into accessible and searchable collections.
The museum itself also committed to the ongoing operation of these systems, averaging roughly $20,000 annually in licensing costs alongside staffing, digitization, and continuing cataloging efforts. Compared to the scale of the collections being managed, the systems function less as optional technology and more as core institutional infrastructure.
Museums Now Serve a Global Audience
The public itself has also changed.
People no longer expect access to historical information only through physical visits, card catalogs, or scheduled research appointments. Researchers, authors, students, filmmakers, historians, and aviation enthusiasts now search for information from computers and phones anywhere in the world.
Without digital access, much of a museum’s holdings would remain effectively invisible to anyone unable to physically visit the institution, and even then, visitors often would not know what existed beyond what happened to be on display.
Only a small percentage of most museum collections are publicly exhibited at any given time. The majority remain in storage, archives, libraries, and research collections that depend heavily on cataloging and digital access to remain discoverable.
Another major shift has been how researchers interact with collections.
Historically, much of museum and archival research required physical appointments, onsite staff assistance, paper finding aids, and manual retrieval of materials. Researchers often depended heavily on staff knowledge simply to determine whether relevant materials existed.
Digital collection systems fundamentally changed that process.
Today, many researchers begin independently. They search online catalogs, browse digitized images, identify relevant materials remotely, and narrow requests before ever contacting the museum. In many cases, research questions that once required extensive staff involvement can now be answered through publicly accessible records and digital image collections.
Without integrated systems and online access tools, museums would require significantly more staff time to respond to the same volume of research requests, schedule appointments, search for materials, retrieve records, and guide researchers through fragmented collections manually.
The systems do not replace staff expertise. They allow that expertise to be used more effectively.
Instead of spending large amounts of time reconstructing basic information or manually searching disconnected records, staff can focus more energy on preservation, interpretation, exhibits, acquisitions, and complex research support.
At institutions managing millions of items, that distinction becomes increasingly important.
Today, the museum’s digital image collections receive roughly 40 million views annually through Flickr. Public interaction has also improved cataloging through crowdsourced identification of aircraft, markings, locations, and historical details that may not have been fully documented internally.
Museums have long relied on measurable metrics such as attendance, memberships, educational programs, and onsite visitation to demonstrate public impact. Digital access can also be quantified, although its value often functions differently.
Online collections generate measurable engagement through image views, catalog searches, research activity, and worldwide access to materials that would otherwise remain physically inaccessible to most audiences. While digital access does not always create immediate revenue in the same way as admissions or ticketed programs, it can influence museum visitation, research usage, publication requests, reproduction fees, licensing, and broader institutional visibility over time.
Digital access transformed the museum from a place people had to physically visit into a collection people can explore globally.
Preserving More Than Objects
Visibility matters. But so does continuity.
Without integrated systems, knowledge often remains trapped in individuals. Longtime staff may know where materials are located, how older numbering systems worked, or which spreadsheet contains critical information. But institutional memory is fragile. People retire. Departments change. File structures evolve. Information becomes harder to reconstruct over time.
Collection systems help preserve continuity alongside the collections themselves.
In the digital age, preserving history is no longer only about protecting physical artifacts. It is also about preserving the ability to locate, connect, understand, and access the information surrounding them.
Museums are often judged by what visitors can see: exhibitions, aircraft, artifacts, attendance, and public programs. But underneath those visible experiences is a much larger information structure quietly holding millions of historical relationships together.
When financial pressures force institutions to question systems that seem invisible to the public, the consequences are rarely immediate. Collections do not suddenly disappear overnight. Instead, access slowly becomes harder, staff time shifts toward reconstruction work, fragmentation returns, and institutions gradually lose continuity, efficiency, and public visibility in ways that become increasingly difficult to rebuild later.
The cost is rarely felt all at once. It appears gradually through lost time, reduced access, disconnected information, and the growing difficulty of managing collections that continue to expand while the infrastructure supporting them is treated as optional.
In the digital age, museums are no longer only preserving objects. They are preserving the ability for the world to find, understand, and connect with the history those objects contain.
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Originally published on LinkedIn on May 15, 2026. Read the original article on LinkedIn.
