Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

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!

Today we’re launching the next installment in the Brooklyn Museum Collection on the Web—more than 4,000 images from the Libraries and Archives will join the 5700+ works of art and the nearly 10,000 views of past exhibitions that you’ve already been enjoying. Opening up this latest part of the collection to our community is close to my heart—I used to be the archivist here at the Museum before I went over to the “dark side” and started working with virtual stuff instead of the real thing. Hooray! Looking back over the work we’ve done building a DAMS for the Museum, a couple of visuals, a question, and a caveat jump to mind:

“The pipeline opens.”

Back in 2005, when we first started talking about digital imaging, I kept envisioning a giant pipeline pouring out images onto my office floor (at 3AM, of course). OK, we’ve got that under control – everything’s now pouring into the DAMS pretty smoothly – AND images are now flowing out to the Museum’s Collection on the Web pages. More importantly, they do so without anybody throwing a switch, copying image files, or writing captions, which brings me to image #2:

“Plays well together.”

It’s not a cliché to say that everything is interconnected. Our DAMS and Collection on the Web projects couldn’t happen without both human and application interactions. The web of collaboration engages people throughout the Museum to the community beyond, from the start of workflow when an image is requested, to the tagging, mashups, commentary, and glossy publications once it’s out in the world. And it’s not just people: our Luna DAMS talks to TMS (our collections management system) and vice versa; our website applications talk to both as well as to content management data sources. Not to speak of Flickr, MySpace, and beyond.

“What’s ‘The Collection’?”

Like most museums, we have a great deal of great “stuff” that extends beyond the formal collection: collections of documentary photographs; special collections in the libraries and archives; scrapbooks, letters, receipts, photographs, and other documents that came to the Museum along with an accessioned object. Curators, librarians, and archivists can’t resist these materials, which help tell the story of the collection.

How the Museum grew over the years and how we presented and interpreted the objects is part of the story that can be told with materials from the Museum Archives: pictures of the building and its galleries; views of exhibition installations; press releases and other historical documents. We’ve already launched our exhibition images on the Web (a project I worked on with HTML babysteps years ago); today’s release of a cross-section of archives and library materials is just the start of offerings that will let you build connections across the collection.

“You’ve got to love data to do this job.”

Building a DAMS isn’t all about the pictures—if that was the case, we could just throw the images up and say “browse.” You have to be able to find the image you want and, if you’re on the working side of the equation, you’ve got to manage great masses of image files. The data-crunchers in the Digital Lab link every image to basic “metadata,” object data comes from TMS, and our dedicated Web community provide tags, item by item. It’s a lot of steps by a lot of people…more on imaging and data workflow in my next post.

A recent post on NYC Social alerted us to the Brooklyn Bridge’s upcoming 125th anniversary celebration (May 22nd-26th), featuring fireworks on the 22nd. Fireworks have to be one of my favorite NYC treats, from the 4th of July to the display over the beach at Coney Island on summer Friday nights. Artists–and photographers, especially–love fireworks, too. It’s a real challenge to capture the magic.

Bruce Cratsley (American, 1944–1998). Brooklyn Bridge Centennial Fireworks, 1983.
Gelatin silver print. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Billy Leight, 1996.167. © Bruce Cratsley

There’s a long tradition of fireworks over the Brooklyn Bridge, from its opening in 1883 to the centennial in 1983, and I’d venture to guess that every one of them has been captured by artists. A few years ago, we digitized everything we could find in the Museum collection that had to do with the Brooklyn Bridge, including some wonderful fireworks images. Take a look at The Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn Museum: Spanning Art and History.

There must be thousands (millions?) of photographs around from the last big celebration in 1983, in shoeboxes, slide carousels, and all of other analog places. This time, though, it’s going to be easier to share all of the digital images sure to be created during the 5-day celebration. Join our Brooklyn Bridge (Brooklyn Museum Web site) Group on Flickr and add your amazing fireworks images to the more than 900 images of “our” bridge on Flickr and linked to the Brooklyn Bridge pages on Museum website.

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

In case you missed it, our very own Sarah Gentile was profiled in Sunday’s New York Times.  The Styles article by Kara Jesella, focuses on hipster librarians.  Check out the full article and we’re happy to note it was the #1 most e-mailed story at NYT this morning.