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.