Author Archives: Deborah Wythe

Deborah Wythe

About Deborah Wythe

Deborah Wythe manages the Brooklyn Museum’s Digital Collections and Services department (the “Digital Lab”), coordinating digital imaging activities museum-wide, including the photo studio, scan lab, digital asset management, and rights and reproductions. Before moving to the Digital Lab, Deb was the Museum Archivist, where she managed the Museum’s historical records and worked on several technology-driven projects. Deb edited the new edition of Museum Archives: An Introduction, published by the Society of American Archivists in 2004, and wrote the chapters on the museum context, appraisal, description, records surveys, and photographs. Prior to joining the Brooklyn Museum staff, she worked on the Steinway Collection at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives and, as an intern, organized the records of the Department of Musical Instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In her previous life, before discovering archives work (she has always been a museum maven), Deb earned her Master’s and PhD in musicology at NYU. She still studies the piano.

Geotag Brooklyn

Trying to track the history of the images of Brooklyn that we’re geotagging for #mapBK on Flickr and Twitter and then porting to Historypin reminds me of the game of tag, with kids dashing from one side of the yard to another. This … Continue reading

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Brooklyn Museum books online!

About a year ago, inspired by LACMA’s Reading Room, we started thinking about digitizing some Brooklyn Museum publications. We were excited to learn that many of the Museum’s publications had already been digitized–Google Books, Microsoft, and university digitization projects have … Continue reading

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Working Guidelines for the Copyright Project

“Any analysis of ownership and duration must be performed on a case-by-case basis for each work.” Copyright & Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for U.S. Libraries, Archives & Museums. Peter Hirtle, Emily Hudson and Andrew T. Kenyon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell … Continue reading

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Copyright is complicated

Copyright is complicated. What’s protected? What’s not? And it’s even more complicated for art, where the work may not be dated and there are questions about whether it was “published” and what “publication” means. And it’s a legal matter, which … Continue reading

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Pictures! Pictures! Pictures!

Today we’re launching the next installment in the Brooklyn Museum Collection on the Web—more than 4,000 images from the Libraries and Archives will join the 5700+ works of art and the nearly 10,000 views of past exhibitions that you’ve already … Continue reading

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Fireworks! The Brooklyn Bridge’s 125th anniversary

A recent post on NYC Social alerted us to the Brooklyn Bridge’s upcoming 125th anniversary celebration (May 22nd-26th), featuring fireworks on the 22nd. Fireworks have to be one of my favorite NYC treats, from the 4th of July to the … Continue reading

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A final goodby to the darkroom

Last month the last of the darkroom equipment finally left the Museum, nearly 2 years after we shut down the darkroom for good (the darkroom is now the Scan Lab and the film loading room is my office, complete with … Continue reading

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So what’s a DAMS and why do we need one?

It was brought to my attention that even my attempt to explain DAMS (“digital asset management system”) fell on the side of jargon and could use some explanation. I can do that… Digital asset. The easiest way to think about … Continue reading

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Getting the picture(s): DAMS, part 1

First, a little background: Two years ago, I was working in the Museum Archives, where we were busily scanning hundreds, then thousands of images. Once we started approaching ten thousand, it became clear that our bulging Access databases weren’t going … Continue reading

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