Nicole Davis
Supervisory Archivist
The Museum of Flight
The Museum of Flight’s collection is one of the largest air and space collections in the United States. We have more than 150 unique air and spacecraft; more than 25,000 objects; a library with about 60,000 periodicals, 42,000 books, and 18,000 manuals; and more than 5,000 cubic feet of archival material. Archival material consists of more than 1 million photographs; audiovisual and digital materials including oral histories; personal collections with logbooks, military records, scrapbooks, diaries, and correspondence; oversize materials such as posters, blueprints and technical drawings; airline ephemera including brochures, tickets, timetables, and advertisements; philatelic materials; and artworks on paper.
The Museum traces its start to the early 1960s, when a few aviation enthusiasts discovered the last known example of a Boeing Model 80A in a dump in Anchorage, Alaska. The aircraft was recovered and brought to Seattle for restoration. In 1965, the group was incorporated as a non-profit organization known as the Pacific Northwest Aviation Historical Foundation (PNAHF), whose mission was to preserve aircraft, artifacts, library, and archival materials that documented aviation history in the Pacific Northwest. The group had amassed a collection large enough to form a dedicated museum by 1968, and then the organization officially became The Museum of Flight. At the time, the collection included an extensive library founded by Harl V. Brackin, The Boeing Company’s first corporate historian and key founder of PNAHF. By the early 1970s, Brackin had developed the idea for a museum campus on Boeing Field in south Seattle with the company’s historic “Red Barn” as the showpiece and main gallery building. First used by Boeing in 1916, the Red Barn was the company’s original manufacturing facility, but it had fallen into disrepair. It was transferred to the Museum in the mid-1970s, underwent a full restoration, and then opened to the public in 1983. In the years following, the Museum’s collection grew exponentially. As our campus expanded and we acquired more aircraft, our collection’s focus shifted away from just Pacific Northwest aviation history to also include commercial, military, private, general aviation, and finally, space history.
The Archives is part of the Museum’s Collections Department. The Collections Department is headed by the Director of Collections (Amy Heidrick). The Supervisory Archivist (Nicole Davis) oversees the archives team which consists of a Processing Archivist (Charise Dinges), Reference Archivist (Jenn Parent), Digital Asset Coordinator (Ali Lane), and Digitization Specialist (Karen Bean). We also have six regular volunteers and host temporary interns on a regular basis. The Collections Department also consists of the library and the artifacts collection. The library team consists of the Supervisory Librarian and a Cataloging Librarian. The artifacts team includes the Collections Manager and Collections Specialist. They work specifically with artifacts smaller than airplanes; our aircraft are maintained by a different team. Our Registrar and Oral History Program Administrator round out the Department. We also work closely with our Senior Curator and Adjunct Curator for Space History.
In the archives, we have many noteworthy collections of which we are particularly proud. The Peter M. Bowers collection includes about a quarter million images of aircraft shot or collected by the noted aviation historian. The William P. and Moya Olsen Lear Papers documents Bill Lear’s career as an inventor, including his work on the innovative Lear Jet and Lear Fan aircraft. The Curtiss-Wright Corporation records include business records of some of the earliest aircraft manufacturing companies in the U.S. The George Abbey Papers chronicle the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs at NASA. The G. Harry Stine Space History and Model Rocketry Collection documents the development of the model rocketry hobby. Our team also maintains the institutional archives of our Museum.
We support many internal Museum customers but through our Dahlberg Research Center we assist researchers from all over the world, receiving about 1,000 research requests a year. Our researchers include elementary and high school students working on school projects; college and graduate students; documentary filmmakers; biographers and other writers; genealogists; model makers and other hobbyists; and every type of aviation enthusiast. While we do have a reading room for on-site research, the bulk of our researchers are long distance and we help them through virtual appointments, with research assistance, and with duplication services.
We are located at 9404 East Marginal Way South, Seattle, WA, 98108.
The Museum’s website is www.museumofflight.org. You can learn more about our department at https://www.museumofflight.org/Explore-The-Museum/Collections-and-Research. Our ArchivesSpace public user interface is at https://archives.museumofflight.org/ and our digital collections are online at https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/.
General inquiries can go to curator@musuemofflight.org. You can also contact me (Nicole Davis) directly at ndavis@museumofflight.org.
Archival Elements 