Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Like people, books have histories. Bookplates, inscriptions and marginal notes all tell us something about where the book has been and who owned it. The Brooklyn Museum’s Wilbour Library of Egyptology recently received a gift from the Museum’s Director of an 1885 Karl Baedecker’s guide to Egypt that contained a letter, a postcard and a business card and a very interesting story.

The letter, dated 1926, was written by Hammad Hassab, a dragoman (guide) employed by Thomas Cook & Sons in Cairo. The letter urged a former client to consider a return visit to Egypt. As an inducement, a post card of one of Cook’s new Nile steamers was included (pictured above). Otherwise, the letter was quite ordinary, but Mr. Hassab’s business card (pictured below) wasn’t. Most of the space on the card identifies Mr. Hassab as a survivor of the Titanic.

Luckily, Titanic Passenger lists are readily available on line and Mr. Hassab is listed among the First Class passengers. At the time, he was a servant employed by Henry Sleeper Harper and his wife, Abigail. Mr. Hassab was said to be a very handsome but mysterious man and a subject of some interest to other passengers. On the night of the disaster, he, the Harpers and their dog were safely evacuated in Lifeboat 3. The following morning, Mr. Hassab sent a Marconigram (a marconigram was an early version of a radio telegram) to his brother Said at the Mena House Hotel. It contained the terse message, “All safe.” More information about Mr. Hassib can be found here.

Almost immediately after the sinking, a legend developed that the Titanic was carrying a ‘cursed mummy’. The story is just a story but Mr. Hassab’s provides a genuine Egyptian connection to the Titanic. If it’s true that ninety per cent of the value of an object lies in the story behind it, Mr. Hassab’s business card is a valuable object, indeed.

“To Live Forever” is finally up at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and they have done an amazing job posting a wealth of information on their website. The latest bit to go up is a Q&A session about the conservation of objects for the show. A big thanks to Richard McCoy, IMA objects conservator and his interns who came up with some great questions, put my garbled answers into legible form, and added fantastic links to illustrate what I was talking about. Also, thanks to everyone at the IMA who worked so hard to make this show a reality. One venue down, ten to go.

After I was recently asked to write a blog posting about Click! from my perspective, I spoke with some of my colleagues—Patrick Amsellem, Associate Curator of Photography, and Judy Kim, Curator of Exhibitions–about the exhibition, and we began to discuss the term “curated.” The three of us have all been curators of exhibitions in our careers, but we have also all been on juries for exhibitions, and we think that perhaps what the crowd was asked to do here was to jury the selection—that is, to rank the works that were submitted so that a selection could be made on the basis of that ranking. That is sometimes the first step toward curating an exhibition, but only the first step. Once an initial selection is made, the curator usually begins to refine the idea of the exhibition and to see how the ideas represented by the objects selected best work together, and how placing certain works side by side, or across the room from one another can have an impact on the way we perceive them, and thus help to advance the theme and the learning experience. Further “curating” is done by explaining in written form in the labels some of the ideas the installation conveys visually.

So if the crowd juried the images, how was it curated? And what was the idea curated? The theme of the photographs submitted was “The Changing Faces of Brooklyn,” but that is not the theme of the installation that is presented in our galleries. Although the changing faces of Brooklyn is an idea that underlies each of the works of art in the exhibition, the exhibition itself is about the notion of selection, and, specifically, selection by the crowd. Both visually, and in terms of its written didactics, the installation supports that primary idea, put forward—that is, curated—by Shelley Bernstein. And that is what makes it such an unusual and thought provoking exhibition. It seems to me that an exhibition that was only about the changing faces of Brooklyn in photography might be interesting, but an exhibition that is also about the nature of selection, and all the questions it raises about taste, background, interpretation—and a myriad of other issues—creates a richer discourse. In Click! the theme of the work and the selection and installation process complement and mutually reinforce one another, forming a compelling snapshot of who we are and how we chose.

I am interested to know what others think about this, and I will be taking questions on the subject this week.

I promised a follow-up after we’d been in The Commons for a while, so here you go.

Top 10 Reasons The Commons on Flickr is Awesome:

10.

George Oates is cool and George runs The Commons.

9.

Come together now: Cross-collection searching. Museums have been having trouble with this for too many years. It took Flickr 6 months. George, we want a widget!

8.

Flickr is a global community and that means…say it with me now: multi-language tagging

7.

Flickrites are creative. We asked “tell us how you are using these images” and look at one of the responses we got. Note the tag that indicates this is a mash-up of material from our lantern slide collection and the boxer from Library of Congress for the 34th Weekly Contest on Man Ray. Super fun. Thanks, The hills are alive!

6.

Flickr peeps are correcting our captions…that’s LIéna not Jena. In turn, we are updating records on Flickr and at home.

5.

…are eagle-eye at catching inconsistencies

4.

…are showing us current images to our lantern slides

3.

…helping identify unidentified views

2.

Institutions. The Commons now has 6 participants: Library of Congress, Powerhouse Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Bibliothèque de Toulouse, George Eastman House and yours truly. There will be more on the way soon, but for now take a look if you have not already.

1.

People. We just uploaded our latest set of Egyptian Lantern Slides. This time, in honor of all the Flickr peeps who make The Commons awesome, we uploaded a set of images that have a people focus.

Views, Objects: Egypt. General Views\People [selected images]. View 080: Partly submerged palms above Nile dam, Upper Egypt., 1908, Copyright, 1908, by Stereo-Travel Co. Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 General Views_People, image 9823).

Our collection is going online and this is something we’ve been working on for a long time. Although we have some clean up to do and we won’t be layering this feature into our website until early next week, if you are reading the blog you can catch a preview now.

It has been an incredibly long haul. To get an idea of what we went through, check out this seriously-funny video a friend sent me. We started more than a year ago, had to find and implement a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) and then develop a way the DAMS could talk to TMS (The Museum System, a.k.a. what we use for collection management internally) and then port everything to web. Deborah Wythe is going to be writing soon about the ins and outs and Paul Beaudoin (our fabulous programmer who made this possible) is going to open-source the code by the end of Summer if you want to take a look at how we did this.

There are currently 5,168 records online and this will continue to grow over time. The curatorial staff felt is was important to only release works with vetted data. While there are all kinds of arguments both for and against this kind of thinking, we felt it was important to honor their wishes. Records will move out more slowly, but it also means the data will be in good shape when it does and that’s a good thing.

We had three goals to accomplish in this round of development. First, provide the collection online for researchers and scholars. Second, provide a way a casual user could just jump in and start to visually navigate throughout. Third, we wanted to ensure putting the collection online would be in keeping with our mission and our community-oriented goals.

All of these factors are in careful balance. The strict data is there in clearly formatted areas and we provide an easy way to print this kind of information. We’ve implemented a very visual “related” column to promote browsing and accidental discoveries (serendipity is key). We’ve created a social component where visitors can create accounts and then anything they favorite, tag or comment on will be attributed to them both in the collection area and on their profiles—here’s mine.

In terms of the social component, the biggest thing we did was look at established tagging models and sort of reverse them. Sure, we’ve made it easy—if visitors want to tag they can do so without logging in, but I really wanted to re-think this and put the “social” back into tagging. When I tag another person’s photos on Flickr, I know the owner is going to see my contribution coming from me and even though that exchange is private, it is distinctly social. Even in The Commons on Flickr, as the manager of the Museum’s account, I know the taggers—Flickr lets me see their contribution and I get to know them as individuals. We took this same idea and made that a public exchange in our Collection. So, if you create an account and start tagging—you are rewarded for your effort because it displays right there on the page and we get to know you (or, at least, what you decide to share with us). Check out this record or see below for an example.

The reality is, there’s an amazing amount of work to do to make all of these areas (research, navigation, social) a lot more rich, but this is a start and we’ll be publishing more about this in the blog as we go along. Needless to say, we have plenty on the to do list.

Postcard of the plan for the Brooklyn Museum as envisioned by McKim, Mead, & White in 1893.

The original design plan for the Brooklyn Museum, developed by McKim, Mead, & White in 1893, called for a building of about 500 feet long on each side. The Museum was planned to be 3 times as large, with four courts proposed each about 150 feet square to be roofed with glass. Only one of these quadrants was actually built and it now is the Museum’s prime public indoor space, and the site of the dance parties at our famous Target First Saturdays.

If you’ve been in the building lately, the noise heard all around the eastern part of the museum is the result of our project to create a new glass floor in our third floor Court. The 10,000 square foot glass block floor in the Court has been deteriorating for many years. The glass tile and reinforced concrete panels are only 1 ¼” thick, and this unusually light structure was achieved by custom fabricating panels so that the concrete works integrally with the glass to create a stiff membrane. Over the course of 80 years many glass blocks have broken through use. Repairing the number of cracked blocks that are now there is no longer practical, so a new approach was needed to solve the problem. With support from the State of New York, the Museum was able to create a solution that would be durable, long lasting, and appropriate to the space.

Court currently under construction.

In order to create a floor that was in the spirit of the original design, we decided to preserve the existing glass tile, terrazzo, and marble mosaic tile and construct a new floor 4-1/2” above it, aligning with the level of the first tread in the steps at the four corners of the space. The new floor is made of laminated glass panels each the size of the original pre-cast concrete panels, supported on steel frames. The areas that were terrazzo will be replaced with new terrazzo to match the original. In order to make sure the floor will look the way we wanted we did a mockup, which satisfied our requirements.

Glass floors are a relatively new idea, and only possible because of advances in glass technology that have been rapid in the last decades. The glass is actually a three layer “club sandwich,” about 2” thick, that supports as much load as the building code requires. It has a special slip resistant coating, and small bumps to make it easy to walk over. Between the layers are films that prevent the transmission of ultraviolet rays that could be damaging to art installed on the floor below in our Hall of Americas.

In the Court, the original floor panels will be obscured but still slightly visible through the new glass. This approach allows a person to see the old floor through the new one – an effect that should be quite interesting. When the new floor is completed the plastic panels in the ceiling of the Hall of the Americas below can be removed, restoring its original deeply coffered appearance with the underside of the original glass tiles exposed. Mockups indicate that from the Hall of the Americas, the view to the original glass blocks will be essentially unchanged and the amount of light transmitted will not be noticeably reduced.

In addition to the new floor, we are installing new sprinklers, a new ramp both for improved access, and the nearby bathrooms will be upgraded. After the Court opens there will be a new catering kitchen to service events in the space. Right now the contractors are finishing installing the frames and making the setting bed for the terrazzo panels. The next step will be to install the terrazzo and new glass panels which are being fabricated off site, then the court will reopen to the dance party at the October Target First Saturday.

Cover: Marcia Bricker Halperin. Dubrow’s Cafeteria, 1979.
Softcover: 86 pages, 7 x 7 inches.
Details, including a special $3-off coupon from Blurb.com, can be found here.

It may seem strange that in the third millennium, we still communicate by pressing pigment against the pulp of crushed trees. And yet, although we live in an age of digital data flickering on a screen, people remain deeply attached to books—to the way books look, the way they feel, even the way they smell. A book is, after all, a physical object, with an outside and an inside, and it invites you to enter its inner world and explore it, page by page. This remains an exciting adventure, not only for those of us in the publishing business but for the many millions of the dedicated book-reading public as well.

But how do you produce a publication appropriate to the special nature of Click!, an electronically generated project in which the curatorial shaping of content was designed to take place outside the walls of the Museum and be conducted by the public, in cyberspace? Instead of following the traditional publishing route and working with an established trade publishing company, it was decided to shape the catalogue, like the contents of the show, via the Web—using open book-making software and site resources that are readily available to ordinary users, not only Museum professionals. It’s the kind of project plan often described as “self-publishing.” Although it wasn’t possible to have the public at large create the bound book to the same extent that they had curated the show, it was possible at least to acknowledge the show’s distinctive method by producing this book the way any person with access to the Web would make their own, self-published book—by using easily accessible online resources. Stepping outside the Museum’s conventional way of doing books, which are usually formal ventures with mainstream publishers, the idea was to make this particular book in basically the same way anyone with a computer would go about it.

This meant that the Museum would be making its first foray into the growing business of print-on-demand publishing. Instead of producing thousands of copies of a given book and then storing them in a warehouse or a bookstore backroom until stock is needed, in this new form of publishing, a book is printed when, and only when, someone actually orders a copy, which is then individually output, bound, and shipped. To put the book project into the works, its creator, Shelley Bernstein, worked with Blurb, one of the best-known firms in the self-publishing field, and uploaded the Click! pictures, captions, and text into Blurb’s graphic-design software (while consulting with the Museum’s own editors and designers to choose type fonts and graphic treatments consistent with the institution’s standards). As a result of her innovative thinking, anyone can order a copy of the exhibition’s accompanying book, available directly from Blurb. Now you can experience Click! not only as an array of online images, or as a set of printed photos affixed to the walls of a Museum gallery, but also as a material object you can hold in your hands and keep.

There are those who feel that creating books through “assembly” software online represents, potentially, a revolution in bookmaking almost as significant, in its way, as Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type around 1439. Part of Gutenberg’s genius lay in chopping up words and sentences into their individual letters as separate pieces of wooden or metal type, so that those atoms could be easily assembled into new, unique pages of text ready for printing. Breaking information down into those tiny “bits” actually made it easier to put the necessary pieces together to create something new. In our era, with the resources of the Web, the components of a book can be assembled for printing as freely as Gutenberg assembled the letterforms of words for his press, but now working in the unfettered realm of electronic impulses rather than solid type. You can imagine Gutenberg looking down from his cloud in the great beyond, surveying the world of digitally created books, and saying, “Aha! Not just movable type, but incorporeal type!”

The Click! book serves the same purposes as the online and gallery exhibition, but in its own way. For instance, since the book is, essentially, a photo album in which each picture has its own page, this volume restores the pictures to the egalitarian same-size-for-everyone format in which they were submitted during the open call, instead of following the vote-based larger-versus-smaller sizes assigned to them in the gallery. And it puts the images back into a truly impartial order: alphabetical, by artist name, which is about as nonhierarchical and seemingly “random” a sequence as you can get. Although neutral in itself, the book’s nonjudgmental sequence does make for some surprises: Since by their very nature books are made up of two-page spreads, in our book every image has a random alphabetical companion on the facing page, which produces some astonishing accidental juxtapositions that would have warmed the heart of John Cage. Supposedly unrelated images on two facing pages speak to each other in ways that no one could have predicted. Sometimes the impromptu encounter between two unlikely companions really clicks.

Photo by Donna Aceto, who saved the day when my camera battery died. Thanks, Donna.

I couldn’t help but laugh last Saturday night. Click! was packed—clearly, there was an information cascade happening on the second floor of the Brooklyn Museum. Now that we are open, we are happy to have a cascade like that. Thanks for turning out for such a fun night. It was wonderful for me to get the chance to meet so many of the Click! photographers and evaluators and a lot of folks who were finding Click! for the first time.

In other Click! news, I wanted to note that we’ve just posted a podcast from the panel discussion. I couldn’t have been happier spending a morning with this group and hope you find it worth a listen.

Lastly, I was poking around Flickr this past weekend and this photo by mercurialn (a.k.a. Nate Dorr) brought a big smile to my face, so I had to share. BTW, Nathan Kensinger (pictured bottom right) has a exhibition up at Brooklyn Public Library. Be sure to catch it before it closes August 30.

One of the delights in preserving the Libraries and Archives collections at the Brooklyn Museum is that I am so often pleasantly surprised at what I find in a book or a box. A while back I opened two boxes from the collection of the Library’s special collections simply marked, “Bookplates”. It was a collection of miscellaneous bookplates dating from the 1770’s to the 1940’s. These bookplates are created in a variety of media including etchings, engravings, linoleum blocks and woodcuts. This collection was donated to the Museum over the years when the Print Department was actively collecting and exhibiting examples of printing. Unfortunately, most of the bookplates in this collection are not signed by the artist, but can only be identified by the owner of the bookplate. Here are the highlights:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Since I have had bookplates on the brain, I recently came across this wonderful blog dedicated to bookplates and I most certainly bookmarked it. It’s funny how a few ‘book’ terms like bookmark and web page have made it into our everyday computer lexicon. One wonders what will happen to terms like dog-eared, deckle edge and a personal favorite, double elephant folio (that’s a book up to 50 inches or 4 feet!) in the digital future. As one also wonders what will come of the art of the bookplate. Here’s a website of the American Society of Bookplate Collectors & Designers. Finally, here is a site with a glossary of book terms.

There’s been overwhelming positive feedback about the idea of a Click! meetup during the upcoming Target First Saturday, so let’s do it! I’ll be giving a Click! gallery talk at 8 p.m., so I’m planning to be around from roughly 7-9 or maybe even a little later. If you participated in this process, come on by this Saturday, July 5th. It would be nice to say hello in real space This is also the last Target First Saturday to catch the ©MURAKAMI show before it closes on July 13. Should be a fun night! Full schedule here.