How this demo was built

This site is a demo of a Custom Glider: a website built to order around one collection, so that people can come at it in many ways. Glider Innovations built it from the Smithsonian's open-access records. The Smithsonian did not commission it and has not endorsed it.

The records and images come from Smithsonian Open Access, which releases them under CC0. Only objects whose record and image are both marked CC0 were used, and each object page quotes the museum's own description and links to its record. About 200 records matched instrument words in a first pass. From those and a second search, 111 were chosen by hand for range and for good photographs. Most are from the National Museum of American History, and the rest from the National Air and Space Museum, the National Postal Museum, and Cooper Hewitt.

Several things were added to the museum's records. Each object has a question to start from, a one-sentence account of what it told the person using it, and links to other objects by maker, city, and question. There is also a timeline, a set of trails, a game, a share card for every object, and working models of a slide rule and an astrolabe. The one-sentence accounts were written for this demo from the records and from general knowledge of each kind of instrument, and the museums have not reviewed them. The longer descriptions are the museums' own.

Reading every record closely also turns up the edges of the catalog, and those are collected on the Notes on the records page.

A full build would cover a whole collection, with the museum's own staff checking and shaping what is added.