Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Last month the last of the darkroom equipment finally left the Museum, nearly 2 years after we shut down the darkroom for good (the darkroom is now the Scan Lab and the film loading room is my office, complete with red light bulb over the door). More about that last piece of equipment later.

Anyone who did photography in the pre-digital days and spent time in the darkroom remembers the magic of developing and printing with a great deal of fondness, even as we conveniently forget the lingering smell of chemicals in our clothes and hair. Digital is a new kind of magic, but I suspect that there will always be photographers who develop and print their own images. It’ll continue to be an art.

The Brooklyn Museum has had a darkroom for decades–as early as the 1930s–so it was a bittersweet farewell both to well-worn enlargers that had seen many decades of use and to more recent equipment like film and print processors. We were able to sell most of the equipment and supplies (in the process helping to fund new digital cameras) and also donated some to educational programs — Stickball Printmedia Arts, the photographic program at The Drew Hamilton Learning Center of the Children’s Aid Society, and Bard College’s Photography Department.

We found ourselves at the end of the process with the highest-tech, newest enlarger still in storage. The Zone VI enlarger would handle 5×7 and 8×10 negatives and was definitely professional grade–not something that students or hobbyists would find useful. What to do? Our last-ditch ad on photo.net brought just a few inquiries. Photographer Michael Halsband came by looking for some parts for his Zone VI and got intrigued. The Museum’s Zone VI enlarger is now in his studio and is being readied for use by visiting Cuban photographers sponsored by the American Friends of the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba. A donation that made all of us very happy–and I can’t think of a more fitting coda to our darkroom project, especially just as Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art is about to open. Michael’s comment says it all: “it is very cool to have the enlarger come from the Brooklyn Museum and continue to be used to for creative work. ”

I wish I had some photos of Michael disassembling the enlarger and packing it into his car. A Zone VI is really large and complicated , but he made the process look easy. Photographers never cease to amaze me with their ability to deal with any kind of equipment — on top of taking amazing pictures. Not having any Rube Goldberg Zone VI candids to offer, here’s an offering from our amazing photography collection, a candid from another time:

George Bradford Brainerd (American, 1845-87).
Solution of Dinner Question at the Conduit at Hempstead. Brooklyn Museum, X894.148

It was brought to my attention that even my attempt to explain DAMS (”digital asset management system”) fell on the side of jargon and could use some explanation. I can do that…

Digital asset. The easiest way to think about a digital asset is to simply think, “file.” Most likely an image file for the sake of this discussion, but could be an audio, video, PDF, or graphics file — just about anything in digital format. We call them “assets” to call attention to the fact that it costs money to create them and because they have value to the person or organization that created them. (Besides, DIMS or DFMS just don’t have the same ring as acronyms.) They cost us money to store and back up, too, so we’d better manage them efficiently. If you don’t manage your files, you end up with 5 copies of the same big TIF file scattered around the network, with everybody hoarding their copies because they can’t count on finding them again when they need them.

Management System. When you hit a critical mass of image files (the 10K I talked about yesterday is a pretty effective one to push you into action), you really need a sophisticated database to manage the files and the data that describe both the files (technical metadata) and their contents (descriptive metadata). The system should store and keep track of the master files for you, so you don’t have to set up and manage file storage — there’s only so far you can go with even the most logical folder structure.

You need a good, clear, workable interface where people can work with the images and data–view images, download the size they need for their current project, and upload revised versions. They also need to be able to load their own image files — everybody has a digital camera and a scanner these days.

And then look beyond the individual worker bee at his/her desk, pulling up images for the latest project–when it comes to sending images and data out on the Web, a strong, well organized database is going to make the Web programmer’s work 1000% easier.

And it has to do all of these things without making the network folks blow a fuse. Working on DAMS is going to give you a real sense of what collaboration means.

Most of us have a sense of this with our own image files at home. We started with a handful of files that grew to the point that we were loading things onto CDs, flash drives, and external hard drives. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to find things and share them in the blink of the eye? Get a caption and know who shot the photo and when, without having to get on the phone and use the by-guess-and-by-golly method of data creation? Enter Web services like Flickr and other online services for personal use and the “industrial strength” management systems that we call DAMS for organizations like your friendly neighborhood museum.

You can bet that the administration heard this and more when we pitched DAMS to them. Now we just need to provide proof of the pudding. All in good time. If you want to see more details about what we were and are looking for in a DAMS, click on the “more” link below, but for now, in celebration of the impending 4th of July holiday, here’s my image offering for this post:

Mitchell Tapper (American, born 1953). Fireworks over Brooklyn Bridge, 1983. 83.208.
For this and more great Brooklyn Bridge images, see our digital collection (done without the help of a DAMS, and boy could we have used one), The Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn Museum: Spanning Art and History. Our BB community pool on Flickr doesn’t have anything tagged fireworks — get busy, friends!

Brooklyn Museum: Desired DAMS capabilities

(more…)

First, a little background:

Two years ago, I was working in the Museum Archives, where we were busily scanning hundreds, then thousands of images. Once we started approaching ten thousand, it became clear that our bulging Access databases weren’t going to be a long term answer. That’s when I first encountered “DAMS” — and our new goal — a Digital Asset Management System. And so did others around the Museum: our photographers, the rights & reproductions person, our network managers. Others didn’t realize they wanted a DAMS. They just needed images, images, images. Right now!

It’s been a long road (think Wizard of Oz), but we’re finally in the first steps of implementation. Getting there, we talked to everyone around the Museum and to people in other museums who were setting out on the same road, investigated every commercial system out there, scheduled demos, tested some systems, set up a manual system to tide us over as our digital image collections continued to grow — more than 35,000 image of works of art to date. Most of the systems were developed either for big media corporations or for libraries, not museums, so a lot of the things we wanted to do either couldn’t be done or would take big work arounds. Other museums were finding out the same thing, as we discovered in a session at the Museum Computer Network meeting in Pasadena: Get the Picture: Experiences in Selecting and Implementing Digital Asset Management Systems in Museums. This is definitely the first generation of DAMS for museums. They’re bound to improve (I’ve been around long enough to remember when word processing programs required you to insert “dot commands” for formatting, so I have faith in progress…).

So here’s where we are now: we contracted with Luna Imaging for their Insight software, installed and configured it (a process that took longer than we expected), and have started to figure out how to apply the metadata template we designed (CDWA-Lite plus administrative and technical fields) in this environment. Our goal is to import data describing works of art from TMS (The Museum System, our collections management system) and create the image metadata in Luna. This is more complicated than we had hoped, but the good news is that Luna staff have done just this as a “services” project in the past, so we’re confident that our programmer will be able to work it out with the help of support staff.

And the objects in the Museum collection aren’t the only thing we want to get a handle on: we have upwards of 10,000 exhibition views, already online in simple html pages; Library, Archives, and Special Collections materials; views of the Museum building, people, and events; and all the thousands of images curators have collected over the years.

The point of all of this, of course, is to get it out there. The Museum has amazing collections and we’ve gradually started adding more images to the Museum website, both on the collections pages and our Brooklyn Bridge project. The DAMS will make it easier to share more with our online community.

As we speak, Shelley Bernstein and the rest of the IS staff are “laying the rails” for getting our image riches out there to the Web. Over the next months, I’ll try to post regular updates on what we’re thinking, what we’ve accomplished, and where we stand. If I descend too far into jargon, just comment and I’ll clarify. There was a time when I didn’t know what DAMS, metadata, CDWA, Dublin Core, and on and on meant, either.

Being an imaging maven, it would be ironic not to include a picture in my posts, so I’ll try to pick something interesting, beautiful, or amusing each time. Today, since it’s beautiful outside and I’m thinking about heading down to the water when I’m done here, it’s one of our amazing Audubon bird prints: