Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

I promised a follow-up after we’d been in The Commons for a while, so here you go.

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).

We have just joined The Commons on Flickr to share a selection of images with the Flickr community and to begin our partnership, it seemed appropriate that we start at the beginning! William Henry Goodyear was the Museum’s first Curator of Fine Arts. As an architectural historian (he is known for his book entitled The Grammar of the Lotus), he documented his travels. Goodyear collected lantern slides to illustrate his slide lectures which he presented here at the Museum and during his travels around the world. What you see in The Commons today are selections of images documenting Egypt as it appeared around Goodyear’s time as well as what he saw when he visited the Paris Exposition in 1900.

Left: Lantern Slide Collection: Views, Objects: Egypt. Abu Simbel [selected images]. View 05: Egypt. Abu Simbel., n.d., This slide colored by Joseph Hawkes Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 Abu Simbel, image 9491).

Right: Paris Exposition: Champ de Mars and Palace of Metallurgy, Paris, France, 1900. Exposition of 1900. General view of the Chateau de Mars taken from the Chateau d’Eau. [The Champs de Mars towards the Metallurgie Palace]. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection (S03_06_01_015 image 1945).

While the Brooklyn Museum staff is the primary user of our Libraries and Archives, we are open to the public and are always looking to reach out to a wide and varied audience. One of the challenges is ensuring everyone knows which resources we have available and listening to the needs of our visitors, so we know what to provide and how best to present these materials. One of the more interesting results of “growing” an encyclopedic collection is that we have research collections that serve as an intellectual link to the objects and perhaps act as storytellers revealing the cultural context of the objects. Think about the possible stories behind these photographs and then tag the images with the story you see. Take a look at these photographs and tell us how you would like to use them. What other materials would you like to see?

We believe that by sharing these images we will support a better understanding of the cultures that have created the great art that is held by this Museum. We hope you will agree.

We join The Commons on Flickr today and do so in a manner we hope will start an interesting discussion. Our Principal Librarian, Deirdre Lawrence, has posted about the collections we’ve uploaded and I’m going to write a little about the techie details.

Flickr is a fantastic community. For the last two years, we’ve been uploading photographs (mostly behind-the-scenes of various installations) on the Museum’s Flickr feed. Our experience on Flickr has been a great one where we’ve had a lot of fun and learned a lot from this community who speak their minds without hesitation. When The Commons came along, we jumped at the chance to be part of it because The Commons allows us the ability to upload works from our Archival collections and we hope by doing so, it will create an additional dialogue.

To begin our partnership with The Commons, two sets of images have been uploaded—a selection of images from the Paris Exposition of 1900 (part of our Goodyear Archival Collection) and a selection of images of Egypt from our collection of lantern slides. The Paris images are uploaded at a standard 1200 pixel wide medium resolution, but for the Egyptian images we wanted to offer something more in the spirit of “The Commons”—the Egyptian set has been uploaded at the highest resolution we could provide based on the original scans. This means you can go to “all sizes” and see these images near 3000 pixels on the longest side. While we can’t offer images at this quality all the time—the small amount of revenue we generate from reproduction offsets the costs of caring for the collection—we did want to see what it teaches us about the needs of the people looking. This is “The Commons” after all, so let’s take this opportunity to talk about the issues. Is high resolution really more useful? Is the sampling of these materials of interest in this arena? How are you using our images? What images of yours relate to our collection images?

So, drop us a line (comment here or at Flickr or email) and let us know what you think. If you have a “now” image to our “then”, use the HTML code Flickr provides to post that image response into the comments area. What’s next into The Commons for us? No clue. We are curious to hear from you about the materials we’ve uploaded and will let that be our guide as we consider what to upload next.

Final note: Deb, Angie, Steeev thanks for making this upload and captioning process easy on me