Simon Willison's Weblog: museums

John M. Mossman Lock Collection

2026-03-15T23:38:05+00:00

Museum: John M. Mossman Lock Collection

The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York is home to the John M. Mossman Lock Collection, likely the world's largest collection of antique bank locks.

Tags: museums

The New York Earth Room

2026-03-04T22:48:14+00:00

Museum: The New York Earth Room

On the second floor of 141 Wooster Street in New York's SoHo district there is a 3,600 square foot room filled with earth - 280,000 pounds of it, first installed in 1977 and maintained there ever since.

Tags: museums

Adding TILs, releases, museums, tools and research to my blog

2026-02-20T23:47:10+00:00

I've been wanting to add indications of my various other online activities to my blog for a while now. I just turned on a new feature I'm calling "beats" (after story beats, naming this was hard!) which adds five new types of content to my site, all corresponding to activity elsewhere.

Here's what beats look like:

Those three are from the 30th December 2025 archive page.

Beats are little inline links with badges that fit into different content timeline views around my site, including the homepage, search and archive pages.

There are currently five types of beats:

Releases are GitHub releases of my many different open source projects, imported from this JSON file that was constructed by GitHub Actions.
TILs are the posts from my TIL blog, imported using a SQL query over JSON and HTTP against the Datasette instance powering that site.
Museums are new posts on my niche-museums.com blog, imported from this custom JSON feed.
Tools are HTML and JavaScript tools I've vibe-coded on my tools.simonwillison.net site, as described in Useful patterns for building HTML tools.
Research is for AI-generated research projects, hosted in my simonw/research repo and described in Code research projects with async coding agents like Claude Code and Codex.

That's five different custom integrations to pull in all of that data. The good news is that this kind of integration project is the kind of thing that coding agents really excel at. I knocked most of the feature out in a single morning while working in parallel on various other things.

I didn't have a useful structured feed of my Research projects, and it didn't matter because I gave Claude Code a link to the raw Markdown README that lists them all and it spun up a parser regex. Since I'm responsible for both the source and the destination I'm fine with a brittle solution that would be too risky against a source that I don't control myself.

Claude also handled all of the potentially tedious UI integration work with my site, making sure the new content worked on all of my different page types and was handled correctly by my faceted search engine.

Prototyping with Claude Artifacts

I actually prototyped the initial concept for beats in regular Claude - not Claude Code - taking advantage of the fact that it can clone public repos from GitHub these days. I started with:

Clone simonw/simonwillisonblog and tell me about the models and views

And then later in the brainstorming session said:

use the templates and CSS in this repo to create a new artifact with all HTML and CSS inline that shows me my homepage with some of those inline content types mixed in

After some iteration we got to this artifact mockup, which was enough to convince me that the concept had legs and was worth handing over to full Claude Code for web to implement.

If you want to see how the rest of the build played out the most interesting PRs are Beats #592 which implemented the core feature and Add Museums Beat importer #595 which added the Museums content type.

Tags: blogging, museums, ai, til, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, claude-artifacts, claude-code, site-upgrades

Niche Museums: The Museum of Jurassic Technology

2025-12-08T03:16:41+00:00

Niche Museums: The Museum of Jurassic Technology

I finally got to check off the museum that's been top of my want-to-go list since I first started documenting niche museums I've been to back in 2019.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology opened in Culver City, Los Angeles in 1988 and has been leaving visitors confused as to what's real and what isn't for nearly forty years.

Tags: museums

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

2025-12-08T02:07:56+00:00

Museum: The Museum of Jurassic Technology

Tags: museums

Text a community college librarian

2025-12-04T23:52:21+00:00

I take tap dance evening classes at the College of San Mateo community college. A neat bonus of this is that I'm now officially a student of that college, which gives me access to their library... including the ability to send text messages to the librarians asking for help with research.

I recently wrote about Coutellerie Nontronnaise on my Niche Museums website, a historic knife manufactory in Nontron, France. They had a certificate on the wall claiming that they had previously held a Guinness World Record for the smallest folding knife, but I had been unable to track down any supporting evidence.

I posed this as a text message challenge to the librarians, and they tracked down the exact page from the 1989 "Le livre guinness des records" describing the record:

Le plus petit

Les établissements Nontronnaise ont réalisé un couteau de 10 mm de long, pour le Festival d’Aubigny, Vendée, qui s’est déroulé du 4 au 5 juillet 1987.

Thank you, Maria at the CSM library!

Tags: libraries, museums, research

The Musical Museum

2025-09-21T02:45:54+00:00

Museum: The Musical Museum

Tags: museums

London Transport Museum Depot Open Days

2025-09-12T08:46:31+00:00

London Transport Museum Depot Open Days

I just found out about this (thanks, ChatGPT) and I'm heart-broken to learn that I'm in London a week too early! If you are in London next week (Thursday 18th through Sunday 21st 2025) you should definitely know about it:

The Museum Depot in Acton is our working museum store, and a treasure trove of over 320,000 objects.

Three times a year, we throw open the doors and welcome thousands of visitors to explore. Discover rare road and rail vehicles spanning over 100 years, signs, ceramic tiles, original posters, ephemera, ticket machines, and more.

And if you can go on Saturday 20th or Sunday 21st you can ride the small-scale railway there!

The Depot is also home to the London Transport Miniature Railway, a working miniature railway based on real London Underground locomotives, carriages, signals and signs run by our volunteers.

Note that this "miniature railway" is not the same thing as a model railway - it uses a 7¼ in gauge railway and you can sit on top of and ride the carriages.

Tags: london, museums, ai-assisted-search

Coutellerie Nontronnaise

2025-09-10T14:02:20+00:00

Museum: Coutellerie Nontronnaise

Tags: museums

V&A East Storehouse and Operation Mincemeat in London

2025-08-27T18:51:28+00:00

We were back in London for a few days and yesterday had a day of culture.

First up: the brand new V&A East Storehouse museum in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park near Stratford, which opened on May 31st this year.

This is a delightful new format for a museum. The building is primarily an off-site storage area for London's Victoria and Albert museum, storing 250,000 items that aren't on display in their main building.

The twist is that it's also open to the public. Entrance is free, and you can climb stairs and walk through an airlock-style corridor into the climate controlled interior, then explore three floors of walkways between industrial shelving units holding thousands of items from the collection.

There is almost no signage aside from an occasional number that can help you look up items in the online catalog.

I found the lack of signs to be unexpectedly delightful: it compels you to really pay attention to the items on display.

There's so much great stuff in here. I particularly appreciated the two storey street-facing façades of Robin Hood Gardens, a brutalist London residential estate completed in 1972 and demolished in 2017 through 2025. I also really enjoyed the Kaufman Office, an office space transplanted from Pittsburgh that is "the only complete interior designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright on permanent display outside the USA."

The building is a working museum warehouse and preservation facility, and there are various points where you can look out into the rest of the space (I enjoyed spotting a cluster of grandfather clocks in the distance) or watch the curators arranging and preserving new artifacts.

I've added it to Niche Museums with whole lot more of my photos.

In the evening we headed to the Fortune Theater to see Operation Mincemeat at the recommendation of several friends. It's a fantastic musical telling the story of a real British covert operation that took place during World War II. A cast of five take on 86 roles, sometimes switching roles live on stage multiple times during a single number. It's hilarious, touching, deeply entertaining and manages to start at high energy and then continually escalate that energy as the show continues.

The original British cast (three of whom co-wrote it) have moved to New York for a broadway production that started in March. The cast we saw in London were outstanding.

It's a tiny theater - the West End's second smallest at 432 seats (the smallest is the Arts Theater at 350) which makes for an intimate performance.

I absolutely loved it and would jump at the chance to see it again.

Tags: london, museums, theatre

V&A East Storehouse

2025-08-27T12:49:07+00:00

Museum: V&A East Storehouse

Tags: museums

Datasette ecosystem poster for PyCon US

2025-05-17T20:34:39+00:00

In addition to my workshop the other day I'm also participating in the poster session at PyCon US this year.

This means that tomorrow (Sunday 18th May) I'll be hanging out next to my poster from 10am to 1pm in Hall A talking to people about my various projects.

I'll confess: I didn't pay close enough attention to the poster information, so when I first put my poster up it looked a little small:

... so I headed to the nearest CVS and printed out some photos to better represent my interests and personality. I'm going for a "teenage bedroom" aesthetic here, I'm very happy with the result:

Here's the poster in the middle (also available as a PDF). It has columns for Datasette, sqlite-utils and LLM.

If you're at PyCon I'd love to talk to you about things I'm working on!

Update: Thanks to everyone who came along. Here's a 6MB photo of the poster setup. The museums were all from my www.niche-museums.com site and the pelicans riding a bicycle SVGs came from my pelican-riding-a-bicycle tag.

Tags: museums, pycon, datasette, sqlite-utils, llm, pelican-riding-a-bicycle

50 Years of Travel Tips

2025-02-17T06:39:38+00:00

50 Years of Travel Tips

These travel tips from Kevin Kelly are the best kind of advice because they're almost all both surprising but obviously good ideas.

The first one instantly appeals to my love for Niche Museums, and helped me realize that traveling with someone who is passionate about something fits the same bill - the joy is in experiencing someone else's passion, no matter what the topic:

Organize your travel around passions instead of destinations. An itinerary based on obscure cheeses, or naval history, or dinosaur digs, or jazz joints will lead to far more adventures, and memorable times than a grand tour of famous places. It doesn’t even have to be your passions; it could be a friend’s, family member’s, or even one you’ve read about. The point is to get away from the expected into the unexpected.

I love this idea:

If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. They will ordinarily jump at the chance. They fulfill their filial duty and you will get easy entry into a local’s home, and a very high chance to taste some home cooking. Mother, driver, and you leave happy. This trick rarely fails.

And those are just the first two!

Via Hacker News

Tags: museums, travel

Niche Museums: The Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection

2024-09-27T22:23:59+00:00

Niche Museums: The Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection

DjangoCon was in Durham, North Carolina this year and thanks to Atlas Obscura I found out about the fabulous Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection. We got together a group of five for a visit and had a wonderful time being shown around the collection by curator Vincent Simonetti. This is my first update to Niche Museums in quite a while, it's nice to get that project rolling again.

Tags: museums, music

The Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection

2024-09-27T22:14:49+00:00

Museum: The Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection

Vincent Simonetti collected his first historic tuba - a ~1910 Cerveny BB-flat Helicon - in Boston in 1965, while playing tuba on tour with the Moyseev Ballet Company. Today the collection has grown to more than 350 tubas, and is now the largest private collection in the world that is dedicated exclusively to members of the tuba family.

Tags: museums

The Radio Squirrels of Point Reyes

2024-03-02T17:23:00+00:00

The Radio Squirrels of Point Reyes

Beautiful photo essay by Ann Hermes about the band of volunteer “radio squirrels” keeping maritime morse code radio transmissions alive in the Point Reyes National Seashore.

Via Hacker News comment

Tags: museums, radio

Weeknotes: Citus Con, PyCon and three new niche museums

2023-04-23T04:46:25+00:00

I've had a busy week in terms of speaking: on Tuesday I gave an online keynote at Citus Con, "Big Opportunities in Small Data". I then flew to Salt Lake City for PyCon that evening and gave a three hour workshop on Wednesday, "Data analysis with SQLite and Python".

Since then I've been mostly decompressing and catching up with old friends, and having lots of interesting conversations about Python (and a few extras about LLMs).

After a several month hiatus I've also added three new museums to Niche Museums:

To celebrate this flurry of museum visiting activity, I spent some time upgrading the display of the photo galleries on the site. They're now using PhotoSwipe, which I first experimented with on this blog.

Here's the issue, the full set of changes and a TIL describing what I learned about photo EXIF data in figuring out this project.

Entries this week

TIL this week

Interpreting photo orientation and locations in EXIF data - 2023-04-22

Tags: conferences, museums, pycon, speaking, weeknotes

Pioneer Memorial Museum

2023-04-21T23:35:31+00:00

Museum: Pioneer Memorial Museum

Tags: museums

Misalignment Museum

2023-04-16T03:42:59+00:00

Museum: Misalignment Museum

Tags: museums

Mattie Leeds Sculpture Garden

2023-04-12T04:24:55+00:00

Museum: Mattie Leeds Sculpture Garden

Tags: museums

Every remaining website using the .museum TLD

2022-11-20T00:53:44+00:00

Every remaining website using the .museum TLD

Jonty did a survey of every one of the 1,134 domains using the .museum TLD, which dates back to 2001 and is managed by The Museum Domain Management Association.

Via @jonty@chaos.social

Tags: domains, museums

Golden State Model Railroad Museum

2022-08-13T22:07:22+00:00

Museum: Golden State Model Railroad Museum

Tags: museums

Mendenhall's Museum of Gasoline Pumps & Petroliana

2022-05-16T03:59:37+00:00

Museum: Mendenhall's Museum of Gasoline Pumps & Petroliana

Tags: museums

Paso Robles Pioneer Museum

2022-05-07T17:31:08+00:00

Museum: Paso Robles Pioneer Museum

Tags: museums

Moffett Field Historical Society

2022-04-14T15:32:21+00:00

Museum: Moffett Field Historical Society

Tags: museums

Shakespeare Society of America

2022-01-03T01:45:34+00:00

Museum: Shakespeare Society of America

Tags: museums

Hiller Aviation Museum

2021-08-20T18:55:27+00:00

Museum: Hiller Aviation Museum

Tags: museums

A museum bot

2021-05-05T19:09:20+00:00

A museum bot

Shawn Graham built a Twitter bot, using R, which tweets out random items from the collection at the Canadian Science and Technology Museum—using a Datasette instance that he’s running based on a CSV export of their collections data.

Via @DEJPett

Tags: museums, twitter, datasette

Quoting Aaron Straup Cope

2021-04-01T22:40:41+00:00

If you measure things by foot traffic we [the SFO Museum] are one of the busiest museums in the world. If that is the case we are also one of the busiest museums in the world that no one knows about. Nothing in modern life really prepares you for the idea that a museum should be part of an airport. San Francisco, as I've mentioned, is funny that way.

— Aaron Straup Cope

Tags: aaron-straup-cope, museums, san-francisco

Hearst Castle

2020-02-02T07:46:58+00:00

Museum: Hearst Castle

Tags: museums