Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Are you a fan of the materials being uploaded to the Flickr Commons?   Well, we are huge fans and that got a few of us wondering about a way to thank the community of people who’ve rallied around our materials by tagging, commenting, investigating and looking.   Paula Bray (Powerhouse) was thinking it was high time to take community favorites, do slideshows on our buildings and have a giant global meetup to celebrate! Sure sounded like a good idea to us, so save the date of October 2nd and 3rd—each institution will be posting more information about their hosted meetup as we get closer.  For our part, we are teaming up with the New York Public Library at Target First Saturday for a joint event—stay tuned.

In order for us to have a slideshow, we need your help.  Ryan Donahue at the George Eastman House created a way you can go and vote for which images you’d like to see during the meetup.   So, you’ve got until September 16th to tell us which of your favs should be in the slideshow.

More news via the Flickr blog or the Powerhouse and keep your eyes on this discussion topic on Flickr where we are making all the announcements.  We can’t wait to see you at the meetup!

Librarians are natural collaborators—we share materials through interlibrary loan, data through cataloging cooperatives, and our subject and technical expertise on numerous listservs and professional committees—but moving beyond these traditional modes of collaboration is challenging. Collaboration is hard because it often requires an institutional shift; it is time-consuming and relies on effective communication, teamwork, consensus-building and a healthy dose of respect. Last week, Brooklyn Museum hosted a discussion on collaboration led by representatives from NYARC to talk about the future of art museum libraries and used the consortium’s activities as an example of how museum libraries are working together. Since the launch of Arcade in January, there has been a lot of buzz in the art libraries community regarding NYARC and this was a good session to demystify who we are (the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum, Frick, MoMA, and the Met), what we are doing (shared catalog aka Arcade and digitization projects) and where we are going (resource sharing, collection development and engage future partners).

Arcade launch party held in the Reading Room of the Frick Art Reference Library, February 24, 2009. From left to right: Ken Soehner, Arthur K Watson Chief Librarian at the Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Milan Hughston, Chief of Library and Museum Archives, Museum of Modern Art; Deirdre Lawrence, Principal Librarian, Brooklyn Museum; and Deborah Kempe, Chief of Collections Management & Access, Frick Art Reference Library.

The event brought a nice mix of graduate students and library professionals together to exchange ideas and ask questions of the panel, which included Ken Soehner (Met), Deborah Kempe (Frick), Milan Hughston (MoMA) and our own Deirdre Lawrence. Some of the key buzz words to come out of the discussion were that we have entered a period of “permanent beta” and “permanent whitewater”. I think these two phrases succinctly characterize today’s current environment given economic realities, the swift pace of technological advances and our users’ expectations of working and producing scholarship in an increasingly more dynamic environment. It is precisely due to the perfect storm of challenges facing us that collaboration is more necessary than ever.

Although I have been working with NYARC for the last few years, what I found really interesting during the discussion is the number of projects and sustained level of collaboration that the group has managed to realize… at times, it is difficult to see the forest for the trees and we need these events to focus on what has been accomplished and what remains to be done (a NYARC website coming soon!). None of us are fooled into thinking that we have achieved anything radical yet, but we certainly have the foundation and potential to make it happen. Stay tuned …

One of the things we’ve gotten to know about our community is people often have specialized areas of interest.  In just one example, we’ve gotten to know Vincent Brown and his interest is in all things Egypt, so we started to think about our tagging game and adjustments we could make to enhance the experience for visitors who want to focus on certain types of objects.

So, today, we are introducing “Change My Settings.” From within Tag! You’re It!, you can now change your game preferences by selecting the areas of our collection that you’d like to see:

As Mike mentioned earlier, joining the Posse is now easier than ever with our Google account integration and we are excited enough about these enhancements, that Bob (along with a few willing participants) made us a really awesome video to celebrate.  Have fun tagging and many thanks for all your enthusiasm (50,000+ tags!!) thus far!

If anyone needed convincing that an API might be a good idea, this news might just do it for you.  A few weeks ago, we approved an API key for Adam Shackelford, a Brooklyn-based developer, to create an iPhone app.

We couldn’t have been more thrilled when Adam contacted us to say he was working on this.  It’s the kind of thing we couldn’t do with our existing workload and quickly realized the API was allowing us to do more by collaborating with the developer community.   Before you run off to the app store for this free download, we’ll mention it’s a few weeks off from being listed.  Adam came over for a site visit to show us his just-finished version 1.0 before he submits it to Apple for inclusion in the store.  We’ll be sure to blog when the app is ready, but in the meantime we wanted to share this Q&A, so you can meet Adam.

This will be the first in an ongoing series of Q&As with developers using the Brooklyn Museum API.  If you are curious about our own internal process to create the API, check out the interview Paul and I did for Mike Ellis on his blog. Additionally, you can chart developer progress in our new Application Gallery and find out about our latest additions in the News section (note, there’s an RSS feed to keep you up-to-date).

Site visit!  Paul Beaudoin (left) and Mike Dillon (center) check out Adam Shackelford’s (right) iPhone app version 1.0.

How did you hear about the Brooklyn Museum API?

One of my friends is increasingly involved in museum 2.0 (or 3.0?) emergence, and given the adoption of mobile technology in museums, we often talk about the intersection of our fields. She pointed out the API to me one day, and I thought to myself that someone surely was working on an iPhone application already. As it turned out, no one was, and so I built the app with the time I could find over the course of the last couple weeks.

Tell us about the app you’ve created, thought process behind it, etc?

In my mind, there are few things that inspire people to learn like museums and the web do. They seem like natural companions, and yet often this is not the case. Then along comes the iPhone, which has thus far created countless geeks out of otherwise normal people. Once I saw what the API allowed, it seemed like an opportunity to create something that people would enjoy. The key to invention in this field is to build things that people don’t realize they will use. I have only found one other museum application in the App Store, and it was something like 400 megabytes of space, composed of static elements, so we wanted to do something different. The app is entirely driven by the API, so it is always updated with museum content, and you are always connected to the museum in a very concrete way that was not technically possible before, and isn’t possible yet with any other museum in the world.

If there’s one thing you’d really like to do in version 2, what would it be?

Version 1.0 is being submitted to Apple very soon, and it is really only a foundation of everything we want to do with the application. Because all the content is pulled from the API, it is a very lightweight app that will be convenient for users to update. When the iPhone 3.0 OS goes public in June, we are planning a much more exciting geotagging experience, because the built-in mapping is making a great leap forward. Also we are interested in allowing users to tag items in the collection, expand the browsing options, etc. The main point I want to emphasize is that this is only the beginning, and we are planning to expand the application as the API evolves.

You mentioned this app was designed to scale, so that if other institutions release an API (hint, hint) you can grow the app. Tell us a bit about that?

Version 1.0 is largely just a demonstration. I could spend months refining it before its initial release, but as I said it is a very light app that can be easily updated, and the architecture is designed so that we can add or take away as needed for this or any comparable application. Indeed, we are hoping that this serves as a proof of concept and encourages other institutions to open up their collection to developers and thus the public. I also think that the iPhone can play a bigger role when people are actually visiting the museum, and I have some more elaborate ideas to develop someday. We are of course also interested in being hired by museums to assist with this.

We see from your website that you run an interactive media firm based in Brooklyn (!) - tell us a bit about your background and your company.

The company was started in January 2009 by myself and Katy Walker, our creative director, and Angela Chumley, our chief of operations and information architect. All three of us have worked primarily in advertising and corporate design firms, but agreed that it was time for a big change. We are all creative and passionate about our work, and bring diverse skills to the table, and a healthy amount of conflict and disagreement as well. We started Iconoclash Media because while we do enjoy making other peoples’ visions become reality, we also have our own ideas which we pursue together. The museum app is one example, but we divide our time between contracted client work and the development of original applications and have found that each aspect of our business influences the other.

So, you live in Brooklyn and have probably been to the Museum a few times…. Any favorite exhibitions, objects or events that come to mind?

I marvel at the geometric ingenuity of Islamic textiles, text, and ceramics, and Brooklyn Museum has a good amount of these. I’m also very interested in Japanese art, but I’m going to stop myself here before I list everything at the museum. One feature we built in the app is the ability to browse items totally at random, so I’ve been spending some time cycling through the 20,000+ items in the API, but many of those I have not yet seen in person. And there’s still no substitute for actually going to the museum.

Chances are, if you’ve heard of the Internet, you’ve also heard of Google and chances are pretty good that you’ve set up an e-mail account with them as well. Personally, I’ve got three, and that doesn’t even take into account the e-mail I use with sites that are likely going to send me spam. Another big thing people privy to the Internet will have realized, is how annoying it is to sign up with all the different sites out there. So, since brooklynmuseum.org is exactly one of those sites, we thought we’d follow the great lead of our colleagues at artbabble.org and cut everyone some slack by allowing them to use their Google ID to sign up. This not only saves you from having to use your keyboard to type letters into 3 input fields and possibly think up an entirely new password, it also allows you to save precious neurons on something that’s actually important rather than having to remember your password for yet another site.

But wait! Before you start kicking yourself for signing up with us before we released this super-awesome feature, let me tell you this: we have carefully engineered a solution to your problem. If you login with your existing username and password, then navigate to your account page, you will see a link to transition your account to use Google ID.

Also, if for some reason you come to an impasse with Google and would like to start using another emails address and password to log into our site, you can easily transition to using any other account you choose.