Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

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 (Cindy, Seb - thanks for the headsup on this).

“The Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award was introduced in New Orleans at the 2004 MUSE awards ceremony. Jim Blackaby, a board member of the Media and Technology Committee, passed away in the summer of 2003. Jim influenced many in the museum world with his innovative work in information services and Internet strategies. Conceived in his memory, this award recognizes a project that exemplifies the power of creative imagination in the use of media and technology a project that has a powerful effect on its audience, and one that stands above the others in inventiveness and quality. The winner is selected from submissions to the MUSE awards of all categories and does not necessarily have to be a winner within the category to which it was submitted.”

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!

One of the things we are always striving to do is share our collection in new and unique ways. This can be seen in many areas of the physical building, from our cross-collection approach in American Identities to other installations like Luce Visible Storage. After reading a recent article in Wired, I started to realize why Facebook’s application platform makes it different from its peers and it got me thinking about how we could utilize their API to bring greater visibility to our collection.

As it turns out, one of our programmers here, Mike Dillon, had been poking around Facebook on his own and was eager to develop on this platform. We had a brief conversation about it and the rest, I have to say, is all his doing. By the way, I’m posting on this because Mike is more the punk-rock-i-don’t-do-blogs type, but have to give credit where credit is due ’cause ArtShare rocks!

What can you do with ArtShare? Well, you can select works from the Brooklyn Museum collection to display on your profile. But then, because social networking is about connecting and seeing what others contribute to the social fabric, anyone can also use ArtShare to upload their own work and share it with others. You can use ArtShare to select a wide variety of work, then each time your profile is loaded a different work will be displayed at random from your selections.

For the past week, we’ve been uploading (OK, well, Francesca Ford has been uploading…thanks, Francesca) our collection highlights into the application, but then we hit a snag when we got to our Contemporary collection. Since artists often retain the copyright on contemporary works, we stopped uploading and started making phone calls and sending emails to artists and galleries seeking permission to include their work in the first phase of this project. I have to extend my thanks to the artists (Jules de Balincourt, Barron Claiborne, Anthony Goicolea, Rashid Johnson, Lady Pink, Kambui Olujimi, Suzanne Opton, Andres Serrano, Swoon, Yoram Wolberger) who saw the worth in this kind of endeavor and said go for it. We will continue to contact more of the contemporary artists in our collection and add to these initial works, but we wanted to pause now and launch ArtShare for beta testing.

If you work at another institution and want to share your museum’s collection this way, we can set you up with your own tab in ArtShare. When we set this up for you, your institution’s logo will be displayed alongside the works that you upload, so they are easily identifiable as being a part of your collection. More information on the specifics of how to do this can be found here.

Have fun, help us test and let us know the bugs so we can iron things out. Oh and, while you are there, add me as a friend.