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 Léna 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).

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.

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.

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.

As silly as this seems, it’s just not real until the signs go up and here they are. I will admit, I was more than a little giddy seeing these unwrapped and going into the lobby case and Mary Jane (pictured above) was humoring me a bit by letting me take pics.

Jook Leung (above) from 360vr came in yesterday to shoot a virtual tour of the gallery. For all those who helped curate from lands far away, you can tour from your computer if you can’t make it to the Museum. But, if you can come…do it! Christine and Sarah from our Digital Lab made a wonderful set of prints (the photographers will be very happy) and Lance and Tomoko designed and installed a rockin’ gallery.

Enough already, right? Click! opens today and the panel discussion is at Figment tomorrow

All 389 images are on the website. In addition, the 78 images that will be in the gallery can now be viewed—see “In the Gallery” on the Click! menu. Keep in mind, the sizes on the website are more variable than the sizes in the gallery, so if you see your image in that 78, the sizing in the gallery will be slightly different.

Coming up we’ve got more guests writing for the blog, including two of our consultants, James Surowiecki and Derek Powazek. Our own Chief Curator, Kevin Stayton, will be posting in the coming weeks and we may have a few more surprises along the way. For now, check out the website. The results button on the right side of the page will take you there. Bear with us if you find it slow, we are expecting a bit of traffic today. Need a little introduction? Check out the lo-fi screencast. Click! will be on view beginning this Friday (June 27) and we are making good progress installing the show (see below)!

And now, one quick note of thanks about this website. I count myself lucky that I work with an incredibly dedicated and talented team who loved this project as much as I did and made sure Click! was awesome via the web. Mike, Paul, Jen - I can’t say this enough: you are awesome, you rock my world and this site is rockin’ because of your dedication. Jessica, Joe - you make life around here fun, easy, and accurate to boot. It’s a pleasure to come to work every day—thank you.

Lance and Tomoko hanging the show. We are about half way through.

As with many things for Click!, we’ve made life a little difficult, but for good reason. This Saturday (June 28) we’ve organized a great panel discussion that will be held on Governors Island. Yup, you read that right: Governors Island. A little while back, I was contacted by the peeps running Figment 2008 and asked to present something there. Figment is billed as a “celebration of participatory art and creative culture” and I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate than a panel discussing the participatory nature of Click!. If you want to know a little more about Figment, check out this article from the NYT about the event last year—I just love the “Burning Man East” reference.

This part is seriously awesome: Panelists include James Surowiecki, New Yorker financial columnist and author of The Wisdom of Crowds; Jeff Howe, contributing editor of Wired magazine, who coined the term “crowdsourcing”; Eugenie Tsai, Brooklyn Museum’s John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art; and me. The panel will be moderated by Nicole Caruth, Brooklyn Museum’s Manager of Interpretive Materials and a freelance writer and curator based in Brooklyn.

Now for the hard part: June 28 on Governors Island and the panel starts at 11 a.m. In order to make the panel on time you must take the 10 or 10:30 a.m. ferry. Ferries are free and depart from South Ferry, but seating is very limited. When you get to the island, start looking for Perkins Hall.

OK, ouch, we know that’s early on a Saturday, but Figment should be *fun* and I’m couldn’t be more excited about sharing a table with Jim, Jeff, Eugenie, and Nicole. Have an extra cup of coffee, come take a boat ride and join us!

Keep in mind this was a blind open call where photographers couldn’t see what others had submitted. I find it fascinating that some subjects seemed to ring true among many photographers. For instance, 43 images of Red Hook alone with 5 shots of the trolley cars behind the Fairway, 4 shots of the Ikea under construction (opening this week), 11 shots of the Revere Sugar Refinery (torn down to make way for Ikea’s overflow parking). I realize that many evaluators found it tedious to see these same images pop up over and over again, but you have to wonder—what is it among these particular images or ideas that make them touchstones for the “changing face of Brooklyn?” It’s definitely something to think about when you can explore search results in detail and it will be even more interesting to see if the evaluators felt the same was true when selecting images.

Still interested? Check out this analysis from Page 291, this comment from Trish caught my eye and, as always, we’d love to see your own thoughts and impressions in the comments area.

Now I’d like to introduce our first guest blogger for Click!, Jerry Krase. Jerry is a visual sociologist and professor over at Brooklyn College and who better to ask what he saw in the 389 submissions? For those of you who don’t know, Jerry runs a bus tour through Brooklyn every year for incoming faculty at Brooklyn College. Rumor has it, this is an awesome tour looking at the communities and cultures throughout Brooklyn which enables new faculty to get to know the incoming student body and surrounding area. I’ve known people who couldn’t stop talking about the tour after taking it and with that, check out Jerry’s post up next.

In chapter three, Surowiecki discusses information cascades, the effect of one person making a decision and others following suit. He writes, “The fundamental problem with an information cascade is that after a certain point it becomes rational for people to stop paying attention to their own knowledge—their private information—and to start looking instead at the actions of others and imitate them.” A bit later in the chapter he concludes with, “Collective decisions are most likely to be good ones when they’re made by people with diverse opinions reaching independent conclusions, relying primarily on their private information.” Avoiding a cascade was the primary reason for suppressing comments and direct links in the evaluation tool, but, of course, we couldn’t think of every situation that might present itself. It’s important to keep in mind that there were very few instances of this, but the fact I didn’t see this coming makes me wonder about my optimistic state of mind…

The evaluation was being conducted on the web and we were specifically asking for people to help us spread the word. Some of the posts, like this one, were awesome - here’s an artist who’s spreading the word using our widget which minimizes influence by randomizing images. But, then we noticed posts like this and this popping up (even more here) and, well, I felt a little daft for not instituting a specific rule about it. But, hey, a big part of this project is on the ‘net and who wants to post to their blog without a little self-promo? So, I get it. The reality is these posts are fascinating to read and provide a great opportunity to see the process from the point of view of some of the artists - yay! And it’s really awesome to come across a post like this, where the artist says, “i can’t/won’t tell which image i selected, as i believe it’s against the rules.”—well, it still makes me smile.

All this self-promotion begs the question…did it do any good? We don’t think so. Evaluation was not a quick and easy process and you can see how this type of implementation starts to help when issues like this crop up. We carefully looked at the data to see how much of a difference this kind of self-promotion may have made. Luckily for us, we had enough participation (data) to counteract any skewing and the results were fairly balanced (thank you, again). Of course, this could have easily changed had any one instances above (or similar) generated a lot of traffic with very determined users.

Have fun exploring some of these posts, it will be even more interesting to reference them when you see the results on June 27. Next week we’ve invited a special guest blogger to post about the subject matter in the submitted works…more soon.

Need help installing or just want a better idea of what all this is about? Check out this tutorial from Steve:

Introduction to Add-Art from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.