Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Seeing the response to historic photographs that we have posted on Flickr Commons begs a look back on why we have these images and who created them. Being an art museum library and archives our mission is to collect and make accessible research collections that serve to document the objects held in the Brooklyn Museum’s encyclopedic collection. We also preserve the research documents created or collected by the Museum staff who have acquired objects since the founding of the Museum as a library back in 1823. What that means is that we have a rich historical legacy of text and images that allow us to look back in time and recall the period in which the objects were created–where, when, how and why.

Susan A. Hutchinson, Founding Museum Librarian, with William Henry Goodyear, Founding Curator of Fine Arts in the Library Reading Room circa 1910.

Since the images collected by William Henry Goodyear (1846-1923) are generating interest today we thought it would interesting to look back at Goodyear and several of his colleagues who built the Museum’s collections over the years. So let’s declare 2009 the year of looking back and learning from history. Hopefully this exercise will educate us all as we move forward and learn about each other and our cultural heritage. Who knows maybe we will end the year in a more peaceful way than we started.

Let me start with a quote from artist John La Farge to William Henry Goodyear: “You have opened the window that has been closed for centuries, and have let in the light”.

I believe that La Farge was referring to Goodyear’s intense interest in photography as a tool to document the world he saw. A Yale graduate and student at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, Goodyear devoted himself to teaching and lecturing about the history of art and architecture. After graduating from Yale in 1867, he traveled to Germany, Italy, Palestine and Syria to pursue his interest in architecture. It was in Pisa in 1870 that he began to focus on architectural details and later published in an article entitled “A Lost Art” in Scribner’s Magazine, the first of many essays he wrote about architectural refinements. Goodyear started his museum career in 1882 as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in 1899 came to the Brooklyn Museum as the first curatorial appointment made by the newly founded museum. At Brooklyn, Goodyear led a series of research and collecting expeditions with a mission to build an art collection. He oversaw the growth of the American, European and ancient art collections including the casts of Ancient and Renaissance sculpture as well as designing and installing exhibitions of newly acquired art.

Hall of Sculpture with Casts, circa 1904.

In addition to his curatorial mandate, Goodyear dedicated time to developing his architectural theory that historic buildings were planned with irregularities which he referred to as refinements. This study focused on architectural monuments found around the world from the Cathedral of Pisa to the temples of Egypt with stops in Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece and Turkey. Like his colleague Stewart Culin, founding curator of Ethnology from 1903 to 1929, Goodyear seems to have been interested in everything and this is evidenced in his photographs of people and places around the world from a street vendor in Istanbul to the vivid depictions of the world fairs of Chicago and Paris. Goodyear recognized the importance of these fairs as an educational tool to introduce cultures from different parts of the world. He, like Culin, also saw objects at the fairs and recommended their acquisition for Brooklyn. These photographs by Alfred Percival Maudslay were exhibited at the Chicago Columbian Exposition and collected for Brooklyn after Goodyear and Culin saw them at the fair. Indeed, Goodyear worked obsessively using photography as a tool to educate and a method to document his findings in the field in addition to his writings.

Maudslay photographs on view in the Chicago Columbian Exposition, circa 1893.

It seems that throughout his long life he developed theories that explored new themes in the history of art starting with his “Grammar of the Lotus” documenting continuing use of the lotus form in decorative art since its use in Ancient Egypt. He also wrote several popular histories of art and was one of the first to use actual photographs, as opposed to engravings, to illustrate these texts. He took and collected photographs and used them in the form of lantern slides to illustrate his many lectures–over 130 for the Brooklyn Museum alone–ranging from the art of ancient civilizations to the art of the nineteenth century. In addition to being known as an architectural historian, Goodyear was a scholar of anthropology, archaeology and ethnology with a focus on America, Egypt, Greece and Rome. All of this is evidenced in the photographs (lantern slides, negatives and prints) and his research (published and unpublished) found in the Museum Libraries and Archives.

His photographs offer detailed images of historic structures before the devastation of world wars and rampant twentieth century architectural “redevelopment.” His documentation of many buildings has served as guideposts to reconstruction of several monuments that have been destroyed or renovated over the years. But his influence went beyond architecture since it was his vision that laid the groundwork for two major art museum collections–the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was responsible for recommending the acquisition of several important objects including the antiquities collection and library assembled by Charles Edwin Wilbour, America’s first Egyptologist. Goodyear also established the first children’s museum in America – the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Today we all benefit from Goodyear’s scholarship and foresight as we see the world before us through his photographs and writings.

More to come about these early visionaries in Brooklyn, but today we are honoring Professor Goodyear by releasing more images from his archives of street scenes and mosques in Turkey in response to comments on Flickr Commons.

You may have read about the departure of George Oates in the media, but if not check out Seb’s blog post on the subject for starters. The thing that I worried about most with George’s absence was the idea that our cheerleader—the person who had a very personal connection to each Commons Institution, the one who spread her enthusiasm for our collections to the Flickr crowd—was suddenly gone and how does a gaping hole like that get filled? Well, I learned something very valuable. When community is strong, shifts can take place that fill the gap and in this instance, that’s exactly what happened.

To my relief, a few days after we found out about George, I came in to work one morning to a message in the Brooklyn Museum’s Flickr inbox. I won’t quote the whole thing here, but BigBean sent a lovely note asking us to join a group - “I was very surprised to find that there was not one single flickr group devoted to the Commons! In true flickr tradition, I decided to start one. On flickr, groups is where it’s at!”

Boom! In the simplest way, using Flickr’s existing structure, suddenly we have a fantastic group run by some really committed admins and the participation that is going on there is as rich as it gets and it’s only been two days. This new group provides a direct link to the people within the Flickr community who really love The Commons and this was something we had been missing. Previously, we could make one-on-one connections, but the group allows for much greater interaction among all participants.

As most of you know, we’ve got a set of challenges we have to think about as we move forward in The Commons and, now, the feedback from this group will help us greatly. To say we are looking forward to following and participating in this group is, well, a bit of an understatement.

Looking for something fun? How about this thread where Brenda Anderson is curating mail delivery across Commons collections? Awesome.

One of the interesting things about The Commons is anyone can do it, which is pretty cool. Often, I think, larger institutions have an advantage over the smaller ones in that they get to put personnel behind coding projects to get their materials out the door. For a smaller institution, the coding barrier can be a difficult one—it makes projects expensive and often not doable. Here at Brooklyn, we fall somewhere in between—we are lucky to have a talented team of developers on staff, but it’s never enough for all the projects we’d like to do or to keep up with the demands of our existing infrastructure. As readers of this blog (or if you’ve ever seen me speak at conferences) already know, we will often try and find a Scrappy-Doo solution to get us through, which allows us to experiment before committing resources to major project or, sometimes, the scrappy solution enables us to do a project that we could otherwise never commit staff time to.

The Commons can help smaller institutions by eliminating the coding barrier. Flickr already has ways to upload and change data in batch and there’s a strong community of developers coding Grease Monkey scripts to help add functionality where Flickr stops—thank you Flickr, for a rockin’ API. While some members of The Commons created their own batch upload tools to draw directly from their internal systems, Brooklyn just used existing tools (Flickr’s Uploadr and Organizr paired with Steev’s GM scripts) and this worked well for us without the need of another big project, but it didn’t eliminate issues of workload—it just transferred them to another area. (more…)

This is part two in what I think will eventually be a three part series (sorry, Tyler, I realize you are the king of the three part-er, but this requires some room). In the last post on the subject, I was exploring some of the confusion generated from our rights statement. For this post, I’ll be discussing how differences in content can shift the balance in unexpected ways. (more…)

I’ve already reported on many of the really cool things that can happen when participating in a venture like this one. We continue to get feedback on all kinds of usage and it’s been great to see people discovering these images and working with them in different ways.

World’s Columbian Exposition: Ferris Wheel, Chicago, United States, 1893. View of Ferris Wheel, [which dwarfs surrounding buildings,] Sept.; Starks W. Lewis, Amateur, Brooklyn, N.Y. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection (S03_06_01_016 image 2194).

One day, we came in to a fantastic surprise: Brian Karpuck re-used materials on his blog to create a walking tour of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This is exactly what we were hoping for—mash-ups that would highlight the materials at hand and show them off in creative ways. Check out his posts and the panorama he created (thanks, Brian!):

Touring the Chicago World’s Fair: The Court of Honor in Pictures
More Pictures From the White City
The Original Ferris Wheel in Pictures
Chicago’s World’s Fair: The Remains of the Day

When people ask me how things are going for us with The Commons, I immediately think of friends on Facebook who’ve listed their relationship status as “it’s complicated.” Even with really, really great stuff going on like Brian’s effort to further define our Chicago resources, we’ve had confusion and frustration of our own making. As it turns out, the rights statement we were using on The Commons wasn’t clear enough. Our institutional policy is to release as much material possible, but we do reserve the rights for commercial use because the money that is made from those uses helps us take care of the collections we own. We realized that our own statement on Flickr was generating confusion because it didn’t state these expectations one way or another.

Like everything we jump into, we change and adjust as needed. In this instance, we’ve clarified our rights statement and wait to see if this change eliminates confusion. In the meantime, we are holding off uploading anything else until we can see if this resolves some of the issues we’ve been facing. We are hopeful these changes will help and the 2000+ images I’ve got cloaked on our Flickr feed can be released soon.

There have been other complications. We started to see our images in The Commons migrating to Wikimedia Commons. Check out discussions here and here. Initially a template was created that would mirror the rights statements, but that template is now slated for deletion—take a look at this discussion. We ended up resolving the issue by working with an editor at Wikimedia directly and after this help, good news, all of the Brooklyn Museum Commons images that were uploaded to Wikimedia link back to our now-clarified rights statement (example) which puts us more at ease. Working with the wiki editors has been a really positive experience and it leaves me thinking about ways we can do a better job of working with this community, so stay tuned!

We’ve had some other Commons-related issues going on as well (all of our own making, which easily fall under the “be careful what you wish for” category), but this is already a long post, so e-mail me if you want more info on those.