Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

If you were following us on Twitter last June, you probably remember us live tweeting as a group of mummies were taken to North Shore University Hospital for CT scanning.  Tomorrow, our conservators are going to be in our conservation lab re-wrapping the “Anonymous Man” (shown above getting his CT scan) to get him ready for display for the Mummy Chamber (pdf) long-term installation opening in early Summer.  We’re going to live tweet the process direct from the lab and the conservators are going to answer questions via Twitter as time allows.  Should be a fun, behind-the-scenes look the process from our conservation lab. 

Follow us - we’ll be using the #mummywrap hashtag and hope to see you tomorrow!

Did you know that today is the first annual World’s Fair Use Day?

We’ve been toiling over an ongoing project to better identify the rights status of objects in our online collection, so with World’s Fair Use Day it seemed like an appropriate  week to start blogging about these significant changes and launch this project into the wild.

Starting today, each object on the Museum’s collections pages will have information on its rights status, including those that are understood to be under no known copyright.  Also included is information to clarify what we mean by a certain rights type and, importantly, links to further information about copyright.  We are asking members of our community to comment and e-mail if they can provide more information about artists, corrections if they think we’ve gotten it wrong, and generally participating in our ongoing efforts. The addition of this information will be a starting point for dialog that we hope will lead to clearer, more useful rights information in our collection online.

Images that are licensed Creative Commons or are “no known copyright restrictions” can now be queried from the advanced search on our website.  All rights types are integrated into the Brooklyn Museum API, providing greater flexibility in getting to this new data. Lastly, we’ve taken one more baby step in the ongoing direction of opening up more content—with images and text that we own the copyright to, we’ve changed our default Creative Commons license on the site from a CC-BY-NC-ND to a CC-BY-NC, to allow for greater re-use of materials.

Over the next few days, we’ve got some blog posts coming about the specifics—stay tuned for posts from from Deborah Wythe, Head of Digital Collections and Services and Arlene Yu, an intern working with her.  Please be sure to read the whole series if this subject interests you.

If you’re our mayor on Foursquare, we’ve got a promo running that you should check out.  Not the mayor?  Be sure to check-in at the Brooklyn Museum to see if you can take the crown by out-seating michael d.

As most of you know, the museum has a presence on several social networks and we never jump in without having a real reason to be there.  So, what makes Foursquare important enough for us to jump in?  As simply as I can put this, Foursquare is about place and identifying yourself through that.  It is a celebration of the visitor—the people who crossed the river, who made it in the door and decided to identify themselves with us…right here at 40.67124,-73.963834.

For those of you who are not mobile obsessed, you might be wondering what in the world I’m writing about. Foursquare is a location aware application that people use on their phones to check-in at various locations throughout major cities all over the world and you earn points, join friends and unlock goodies as you go.  A person with the most check-ins at one place becomes that venue’s mayor.  This may seem strange and a bit silly if you’ve never used it, but I can tell you from personal experience that it’s wildly addictive and fun.

So, what does being on Foursquare mean, exactly?  Well, for us, it means owning how Foursquare works, playing within the existing structure and keeping that interaction as personal as possible. On Foursquare, people leave “tips” at venues they like—little bits of advice so other people know what to expect when they go there.   Many of our staff are essentially local experts, so we’ve queried them to compile tips to the wealth of options that exist in our local neighborhood, Prospect Heights.  So now, as people explore our area, the Brooklyn Museum staff help them along in their journey pointing out the joys of pancakes at Tom’s Restaurant or the killer wine selection at Abigail’s.

In addition, we’ve taken all those tips from our staff and created a new page on our site for local restaurants. This page is uses the Yelp API to find venues and connect visitors with more than our own selections, creating a community-driven restaurant recommendation page for the local area.  So, no matter if you are on Foursquare or know nothing about it at all—you can view the same information in two different formats.

The tips are an easy start, but there’s more we could do with Foursquare. Venue pages for exhibitions or permanent collections could be established, which means people could check-in at the galleries they visit—American Identities, The Dinner Party, Egypt Reborn, etc—and become the mayor of not just the museum, but of their favorite installation within the greater whole.  You could even make a game out of this.  This is something we are seriously considering, but first we want to take it slow and see what response has been to our presence and then move on and adapt from there.

One thing we’d love to see is a Brooklyn Museum badge that gets unlocked after a certain number of visits.  Badges reward visitors who have come in our doors multiple times and, to me, this is one of the most important things we could do on the site.  The awesome folks who run Foursquare are still considering if that’s something they can pull together for us, but I’m hopeful it could happen one day. In the meantime, I’ll give the Foursquare addicts a preview of what that might look like and tell you to keep checking in, because one day you might get a message that says, “you’ve unlocked the Brooklyn Museum badge.”

Two possible designs for the Brooklyn Museum Foursquare badge.

So, tips and promos are a start, badges are the dream and there are more than a few other possibilities in between. You can also check out our website where Paul has been working with the Foursquare API to pull together a landing page to show all the current activity. My favorite part of this page is the ability to see all the tips we’ve left in one place and the feature that shows off not only our current mayor, but all of our former mayors as well.  Think of this like one of those walls of mayoral portraits that you see at every city hall!

I’m telling you, this has been a long, never ending haul.  We’ve been quietly working on a number of ways to improve our online collection and our exhibition archive. Sometimes these things take a lot of time and require boatloads of aspirin. Here’s a run down of what’s new:

Object labels now online.  Our curators write tons of chat labels for the objects in the galleries and we’ve gone through and digitized them, which was not an easy process.  Francesca found the easiest way to get the data was to go through the galleries with a camera and take photographs of each label and then OCR the photo to get the text for proofing.  Yeah…it was a pain, but it worked and, in doing it this way, we knew we had the absolute latest text on the wall.  This was Francesca’s final project with us and I think she was more than excited to move back to Australia after dealing with this mountain of data entry. Moving forward, our Design Department now gives us the final versions in PDF format, so we just cut and paste to get them out to the web.  As I wave across the world and give a big thank you to Francesca, I can say there are now over 2500 labels online.

Checking out the object label for the Cartonnage of Nespanetjerenpere—now also online. Photo via timothycgoodwin on Flickr.  All Rights Reserved.

Pushing press releases out the door.  We’ve been working to fill out our exhibition archive, which has records of every exhibition staged here with dates and, when available, includes photography of the installations.  That was a lot of data to push out the door, but we recognized there was a lot more we could do to give a fuller picture of some of the contents of each exhibition.  Erin, with the help of our editors Joe and Jillian, has long been working on a project to digitize our archive of press releases, which give a wealth of contextual data around a given show.  Erin was dealing with no easy task—trying to OCR some of these records was a nightmare…differences in typewriter style from way back when combined with paper in various conditions equals OCR going #@$@#% and that’s enough to give anyone a headache! Through thick and thin, she’s managed to digitize everything from 1929-1950 and 2000-present.  We are still working on the years between ‘51-’99, but we’ve managed to push out over 700 press releases for 446 exhibitions and more are on the way.

Detail of a 1934 press release for the Contemporary New York City Municipal Architecture and Allied Arts exhibition. Along with the text, we’ve included the original image of the releases and it’s pretty fun to go through and compare how these looked from year to year.   Perhaps not so fun to digitize, but cool to see how things changed—check out the old phone exchange at the top of the release!

Didactics from exhibitions are now going online as well.  We managed to get a stash of these from our Design Department going back seven years, so after a monster round of data entry in every spare moment of my time, you can find 530 didactics for 109 exhibitions and we’ll continue to upload them as we get them.

Exhibition didactic from Caillebotte—now online under the didactics tab.

Brooklyn Museum objects in exhibitions. Paul with the help of our Collections Manager, Chrisy, has hooked up the collections database to the Exhibition Archive and we can now list Brooklyn Museum objects that were in these shows. This is a long project data entry project that we’ve just begun, but you can see the seeds of this taking root in records like Caillebotte (below), Tissot and Brushed With Light.

New York Times API synergy.  Our hometown paper is the NYT and, luckily, they’ve created an API which means we can access their data.  Paul has worked to match up related NYT articles with our exhibition archive and that means we can display stubs and links to NYT reviews, listings and other fun things under the press tab. Currently the NYT Article Search API only goes back to 1981, but we hope they will release the entire archive eventually—with records in our exhibition archive going back to 1843, you can imagine how many matches we could have one day.  The great thing about utilizing an API?  No data entry!

Come together now. To see all of this work in one place, check out the record for Tissot.  We’ve got installation photos, didactics, the press release, the NYT press coverage and 124 of the Brooklyn Museum objects in the show…along with all of their object labels.  Whew!

If you are a fan of the The Commons on Flickr and live in the NYC area, come to our Common Ground meetup this weekend to celebrate—we’ve got tons and tons of neato stuff to give away!  The folks from the NYPL are going to be joining us to meet and greet and answer questions about the fantastic images being uploaded to The Commons.  We’ll be running a really big slideshow curated by the Flickr community in the lobby, so come find us this Saturday October 3rd, 6-9:30 pm!  That’s smack dab in the middle of a fabulous opera-inspired Target First Saturday, so there will be lots to do here that evening.

Don’t forget, this is a global meetup, check out these other venues if you live closer to these areas:

Sydney, Australia. A bit jealous of our colleagues over at the Powerhouse Museum who have been making preparations all week for an outdoor slideshow on the facade of their building.  The Powerhouse peeps are teaming up with the State Library of New South Wales for a joint event.

Brisbane, Australia.  The State Library of Queensland is also presenting the slideshow outdoors on their Queensland Terrace—one of my personal favorite buildings in all of Australia is the Queensland Library, so that should be an amazing event in a great location!

Canberra, Australia.  The Australian War Memorial is also taking part with a projection in their orientation gallery.

Safety Harbor and Tallahassee, Florida.  The State Archives of Florida are running two events in the area.

Rochester, New York.  George Eastman House is hosting an event in their theatre and that means you can meet Ryan…he’s the one we have to thank for the slideshow because he did a ton of work programming the voting tool and the slideshow via the Flickr API.  Thanks, Ryan!

Corvalis, Oregon.  Don’t miss the photograph on this event listing—these Oregon peeps have a sense of Flickr-humor and we love them for it.

…but perhaps the Swedish National Heritage Board has us all beat!   They are hosting their event in the Medieval St. Karin Church ruin in central Visby on the island of Gotland, Sweden.  That very same church ruin is actually pictured in one of the photographs they’ve uploaded to The Commons.  It kind of doesn’t get more meta than that!

Coming to a meetup?  Tweet using the #CommonGround hashtag and if you upload photos to Flickr, tag them CommonGround2009 and we’d love to see them added to The Commons group.  Hope to meet you there!