San Diego Air & Space Museum Receives Mellon Foundation 2012 Hidden Collections Award

San Diego, CA - March 5, 2013 - The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) announced that the San Diego Air & Space Museum is a recipient of the Mellon Foundation’s 2012 Hidden Collections award for Increasing Access to Our Aerospace Heritage. This two year project will catalog 186 personal and professional papers from the Museum’s archival collections, measuring approximately 2,000 linear feet.

The Museum’s library houses the third largest collection of aviation-related research materials in the United States. The collection includes one-of-a-kind corporate records of significant San Diego-based aerospace companies, such as Pacific Southwest Airlines, Ryan Aeronautical, and Consolidated Aircraft Corporation; personal records from a number of important aerospace pioneers including T. Claude Ryan and Reuben H. Fleet; and records from famous aviators such as Jacqueline Cochran, Charles Lindbergh and Richard E. Byrd. Increasing Access to Our Aerospace Heritage will elevate public awareness of these historically important yet currently underexposed collections by cataloging, indexing, carefully describing, and preparing them for future digitization. Work on the Hidden Collections project will be completed by January 2015.

For more information please call or visit visit www.sandiegoairandspace.org