International Spaceflight Museum

We are trying an experiment. One of the principal activities of any museum is making certain our financial resources are sufficient to keep the doors open. Even for a virtual museum, there are expenses to be met every month. We have to pay Linden Lab their monthly “land use fees” (server rental), and there are a few government license fees, the cost of listing our eBay auctions, etc. So, we do some fundraising.

Within Second Life, we have “tip jars” (devices where SL residents can donate spare $Ls), a PayPal Donation page on this site, and two gift shops within Second Life, one on each of our islands. Now we have just opened another gift shop online where you can buy real ISM branded merchandise, such as the coffee mug illustrated here. Please visit our shop and help support the museum!

Longtime ISM member Opal Lei has started a new wiki for the museum, which we plan to use to document our exhibits. Instead of using notecards, which are somewhat limited and inconvenient (filling up visitors’ inventories), we will create weblinks to the appropriate wiki page, to be opened in the visitors’ web browser.

As well as avoiding notecard spam, the web-based wiki enables us to conveniently offer the information in more languages than before. Some of our notecards have been translated into Spanish and French, but we have hopes that in future we can have versions in Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Hindi and Arabic. All we need are translators, and in fact have been told there are some people willing and able to help with some of these languages now. There is a lot of work to do, basic research as well as translations, so we’d be happy to hear from anyone interested in volunteering their time and abilities in this area. The wiki will not only be the repository for such research/translations, it can help us keep track of which exhibits need documentation. So, thanks again, Opal, for another great contribution to the ISM!