FAQ
ArtShare on Facebook!
One of the things we are always striving to do is share our collection in new and unique ways. This can be seen in many areas of the physical building, from our cross-collection approach in American Identities to other installations like Luce Visible Storage. After reading a recent article in Wired, I started to realize why Facebook’s application platform makes it different from its peers and it got me thinking about how we could utilize their API to bring greater visibility to our collection.
As it turns out, one of our programmers here, Mike Dillon, had been poking around Facebook on his own and was eager to develop on this platform. We had a brief conversation about it and the rest, I have to say, is all his doing. By the way, I’m posting on this because Mike is more the punk-rock-i-don’t-do-blogs type, but have to give credit where credit is due ’cause ArtShare rocks!
What can you do with ArtShare? Well, you can select works from the Brooklyn Museum collection to display on your profile. But then, because social networking is about connecting and seeing what others contribute to the social fabric, anyone can also use ArtShare to upload their own work and share it with others. You can use ArtShare to select a wide variety of work, then each time your profile is loaded a different work will be displayed at random from your selections.
For the past week, we’ve been uploading (OK, well, Francesca Ford has been uploading…thanks, Francesca) our collection highlights into the application, but then we hit a snag when we got to our Contemporary collection. Since artists often retain the copyright on contemporary works, we stopped uploading and started making phone calls and sending emails to artists and galleries seeking permission to include their work in the first phase of this project. I have to extend my thanks to the artists (Jules de Balincourt, Barron Claiborne, Anthony Goicolea, Rashid Johnson, Lady Pink, Kambui Olujimi, Suzanne Opton, Andres Serrano, Swoon, Yoram Wolberger) who saw the worth in this kind of endeavor and said go for it. We will continue to contact more of the contemporary artists in our collection and add to these initial works, but we wanted to pause now and launch ArtShare for beta testing.
If you work at another institution and want to share your museum’s collection this way, we can set you up with your own tab in ArtShare. When we set this up for you, your institution’s logo will be displayed alongside the works that you upload, so they are easily identifiable as being a part of your collection. More information on the specifics of how to do this can be found here.
Have fun, help us test and let us know the bugs so we can iron things out. Oh and, while you are there, add me as a friend.
RSS 
Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
November 8th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Awesome! I just added the app and will start playing around… I’ll have to poke around at the Walker a bit and see if we can get some of our stuff uploaded that we’ve already cleared the rights for - any chance there’s an automated upload mechanism possible? Or did Francesca cut and paste the description into each item she uploaded? Hmm. I just finished building an OAI repository of our collection, I’d love to be able to slam that XML into here somehow.
Either way, very cool, exciting to see some artwork being shared on Facebook!
November 8th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
Hi Nate,
We can set it up either way for you. We did a cut/paste and manual upload because the collection highlights on our website are not backed by a db. It didn’t make sense to redo all that on the back end just to make the upload easier. The good news is we can do this with an account for those institutions who don’t have large IT staffs, but may have less technical staff who could upload manually. Or if you give us a feed, we can use it to grab the data from you and import it. In the feed I think you just want to account for all the fields in the upload form and give us images at 180px wide. I would say don’t give us more than 100 things….we are carefully watching bandwidth and would like to grow this slowly and monitor things. We’d love to have you guys on board…it would be pretty cool!
November 8th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
[…] cool kids at the Brooklyn Museum have developed a way to share their art collection with Facebook users through a new application called ArtShare. According to Shelley Bernstein, they will share the […]
November 9th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Great job guys! Very cool application. As usual you’re ahead of the web 2.0 curve
November 10th, 2007 at 8:56 am
Shelley, you may even drag us out of the mud with this one …
November 14th, 2007 at 5:21 am
Very interesting, congratulations.
November 14th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Small bug: When editing an uploaded picture, the javascript validation means that it’s impossible to submit an update without re-uploading the photo.
November 14th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Hi Frankie, I just fixed the bug. Thanks so much for pointing this out! Please let me know if you experience any more trouble with the app.
November 16th, 2007 at 2:55 am
[…] pointed out by Sheila Brennan, the Brooklyn Museum has released a Facebook application called ArtShare to display their art collection using the Developer […]
November 17th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Hi,
I blogged this but thought I should let you know directly - you can’t read the application Terms of Service without adding the application - which means you’re agreeing to something you can’t read first.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Hi Mia,
I did see your post (thanks!), but I don’t seem to be having the same issue. We are using Facebook’s framework for this, which is pretty solid, but I was curious enough to setup a test account and re-add the app to double check.
First, there are two TOS when using ArtShare. The first applies to installation of the application itself and is shown when you install it. When I search for ArtShare and then go to ArtShare and click to “add it”, I see the typical “Add APPNAME to your Facebook account” page and there are a series of check boxes with this at the bottom:
ArtShare was not created by Facebook. By clicking ‘add,’ you agree to the Platform Application Terms of Use. By using ArtShare, you also agree to the ArtShare Terms of Service.
I can click on the “ArtShare Terms of Service link” and review that prior to clicking the “add artshare” button which installs the application.
Within the app, there is an additional terms of service that applies only to uploading works of art. It works the same way - before I can upload a work of art within the app, I have to check a box that indicates I’ve read this additional TOS for adding artwork. I can click the link and read that TOS prior to moving forward.
I wonder if what you are seeing is slightly different in some way? email me if so and we can work out that bug.
November 20th, 2007 at 8:29 am
Hei. Just checking out if Facebook is good for us when I found your application. I’d like to add it to our museum Page (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=21709195960) but couldn’t find a way to control the app inside Facebook Page Manager.
Everything is working nice on my personal profile page, where I added the app too.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:23 am
Hi Justus, we have the same issue since we’d like to add it to the Brooklyn Museum page as well. Pages are pretty new for us (Facebook just launched them on Nov 6), so we are searching forums to try and figure out how to adjust the app to work in this environment. Stay tuned….
November 20th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Update…Mike just fixed this up so we can use it with pages. When you install it on your page, you want to click the “edit” link on the ArtShare bar w/in the page. Stay away from “ArtShare” in your left nav (that will take you to your own personal settings, not the settings for the page).
January 9th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
[…] ever-busy crew at the Brooklyn Museum made live a nice and simple Facebook application called Artshare late in […]
January 14th, 2008 at 10:38 am
[…] linksUniversiteitsbibliotheek Gent - AlgemeenBrooklyn Museum: Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum » ArtShare on Facebook!Red unieke Gelderse films van de ondergangPew Internet: TaggingBBC NEWS | Technology | Tagging […]
January 17th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
[…] in November, the Brooklyn Museum launched a Facebook application called “ArtShare” which allows users to pick their favorite images from the museum’s […]
February 5th, 2008 at 3:49 am
I’ve added the ArtShare application to my Facebook - thank you. It’s a wonderful way of giving museum objects a degree of personality - or a personality linked to our own. The selection I’ve made probably says a lot about me. Placing these historic objects into a 21st Century online environment seems to bring them alive - almost as if they’re in our homes.
My thanks to your team at the Brooklyn Museum, and to Sebastian Chan at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.
February 6th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
This seems like a stuffy comment for such an exciting application, but I was curious about the copyright of the images uploaded into the application. Do the institutions and artists maintain copyright? I see that all the images used by the application are stored on the Brooklyn Museum’s server and I was just curious if there had been documentation developed around this issue.
Great work!
February 7th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Images used are hosted from the Brooklyn Museum’s server, but they are viewed on Facebook. In our case, for the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, we specifically asked permission from the copyright holder if we didn’t have an existing agreement that allowed for such use. Each participating institution has the responsibility to deal with this issue for any images it shares, per the app’s Terms of Service.
February 11th, 2008 at 11:36 am
[…] Library of Congress a Brooklyn Museum. Prvá sa udomácnila na Flickri, druhá na Facebooku. Blog s informáciou o novej službe Brooklyn Museum sa začína takto: “Jednou z vecí na ktorých […]