This is more than a little overwhelming for us, but we’ve just been notified that the Brooklyn Museum has won a 2008 Forrester Groundswell Award in the Social Impact category. I won’t go into how great the book is—Nina has done a great job of that already, but it is more than cool to be recognized in this way by the very people who wrote the textbook of good example. If you haven’t already, go grab a copy and you’ll see why this is so insanely awesome. The competition this year was crazy—151 entries (finalists here) and as a non-profit, we couldn’t be more proud to be among the winners. Here’s what the judges had to say:
Social Impact
Brooklyn Museum for all three entries:
* ArtShare Facebook App
* Brooklyn Museum’s Click Exhibition
* Brooklyn Museum Posse
“Among many companies using social technologies for the greater good, we recognized a little museum in New York, the Brooklyn Museum. Why? Because of the multiple ways they have used social technologies to put their visitors in charge. They created a Facebook application in which 2,000 people identified and shared the bits of art in the museum that they liked best. They created a community curated exhibit – 3,000 people chose which art pieces to put on display, based on a total of 400,000 votes. And the museum has put the whole collection online, where the community tags it with identifying terms, allowing you to see pieces of art similar to the ones you like, or on specific topics. ”
Thank you to everyone around here who makes these initiatives possible—trust me, it would be hard to name almost everyone in the Brooklyn Museum—just know this very much a group effort around here and, by group, I mean every department. Thank you Forrester peeps and thanks to everyone out there who has been installing our Facebook app, participating in Click! and becoming a member of the Posse to work with our Collection online—most of all, it has been amazing to see what you’ve been bringing to these projects.
Facebook upgraded the design of the user profiles and we knew some action would be required on our part to overhaul ArtShare along with it. We could only devote a few days to adjustments and this meant making some hard choices about what could be implemented at this stage and what would have to wait for a future round. So, what’s new? (more…)
ArtShare, the Brooklyn Museum’s Facebook application just won a Silver award in the Online Presence category of the American Association of Museums MUSE awards. We are in great company with the Powerhouse taking Gold for its online Collection (a project we are great admirers of).
Judges said:
“ArtShare on Facebook is a simple web application with a great, innovative concept: provide a database-driven storehouse of images for users to populate their Facebook pages with and allow users to add their own artwork. In other words, this application creates a new virtual port of entry to museum content (albeit one limited to Facebook users), that taps into the universal desire to “share ownership” of great art. By tapping into mainstream social networking, this application engages new audiences and spurs communal discussion and conversation about artwork and other collections objects. Visually, the application succeeds in retaining the clean and appealing interface of the Facebook site itself, no mean feat in the often-cluttered social networking environment. The Brooklyn Museum’s foresight and generosity in opening this application up to use by its museum peers (ArtShare now includes content from eight different museums ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Powerhouse) preserves the integrity and authority of art and institution alike makes this application an award-winning development. Three cheers for ArtShare’s art-sharing concept, execution, and cross-museum synergy.”
ArtShare now has 2239 users and 12 institutions using the application to share their collections (with more on the way in the coming months). We intend to make some technical changes/additions as soon as Facebook completes their expected profile overhauls.
Side note, if you are at AAM this week, I’m in a session about blogging with some really awesome folks, so come by and check it out.
Update! ArtShare also won in an additional category, the Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award
Having launched in early November, we now have just over 1000 people using ArtShare on Facebook. I’m happy to say we’ve been joined by five other institutions (IMA, Met, Powerhouse, V&A, Walters) with a few more on the way soon. 174 artists are using ArtShare to share their own works. To date, institutions have uploaded 438 works from their collections and artists have uploaded 754.
Those are some of the straight stats, but it probably doesn’t tell the whole story. On Facebook, the highest traffic comes from browsing profiles, so exposure to the images may be significantly higher. For instance, if each ArtShare user has 20 friends, a lot more people could be seeing the images from ArtShare being shuffled on that profile. In a nut shell, 1000 people may have installed it, but a lot more may be seeing it and while this is not the kind of traffic we can measure, it is interesting to think about.
And on that note, one of the things I find most interesting are the works in ArtShare that are most interesting to our users. Here are the top 5 selected works. Keep in mind, these top 5 shift around a lot - this is the top 5 today, not the cumulative over time. Also note, 4 of the 6 institutions are new to ArtShare, so the Brooklyn Museum and V&A collections have received more exposure over time and that’s clearly being reflected here.
We’ve received a lot of great suggestions and have some thoughts of our own to make ArtShare even better. Over time, you should expect to see user interface changes and adjustments that will enable artists using the app to better share their own work. We’d also like to work in a general stats page within the application, so the basic numbers that we’ve reported here are always available to anyone using it. However, these changes must wait until after the Brooklyn Museum’s Spring exhibition cycle when we expect our workload to lighten just a bit. In the mean time, go check out the latest works that have been uploaded - there’s a lot to choose from now!
We just spent some time setting up Facebook pages for both the Brooklyn Museum and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Pages are a new feature that Facebook released on November 6th. Already the page structure is much more flexible, allowing us to do more than the original group structure. You can install applications on pages which means you can offer a much more dynamic environment for your visitors. Because pages are so new, not every app works for this new feature. For the ones that are working, it’s pretty great at saving us tons of time. We are using MyStuff to embed YouTube and Blip.tv playlists. Simply RSS will let you import three feeds, so we’ve got the blogs, events and assorted other things pulling in from existing materials. I’m still waiting for a Flickr app and a del.icio.us app that will work for this new environment, but I’m sure it will be on the way soon.
Incidentally, we’ve made some adjustments to ArtShare so it will work on pages. This is pretty cool, because it means if you add your museum’s collection to ArtShare, then create a page for your institution, you can install ArtShare on that page and have your collection shuffle right there. In addition to this improvement, we’ve also made selecting work a bit easier (there’s a preview function now) and the V&A just added their collection to the app!
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