Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

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.

If you’ve checked out the Museum’s calendar in the last twelve hours or so, you may have noticed how different (or, really, how not different) it is. That’s right, our calendar now looks like it fits with the rest of our Web site.

Remember what our old calendar looked like? Let’s give it one last hurrah:

Starting today, we are rolling out some calendar upgrades to improve ease of use and allow us to disseminate event information more flexibly. Today I mainly want to talk about ease of use.

The Museum’s calendar actually has two distinct sets of users. On the front end we have visitors to our Web site (and, hopefully, to the Museum itself). But behind the scenes, our ever-patient editors comprise another group with very different needs. We tried to keep the user experience of both visitors and editors in mind over the course of the calendar upgrade.

What’s new for visitors
Many things, big and small. Let’s start with the big stuff:

New layout
We switched to a wider layout and ditched those blocks of color. And, on pages that display a range of dates (like the week, month, and weekend views and the “browse by category” pages), we’ve now grouped the events under easy-on-the-eyes date headings. No more “2009-04-18″ above each and every event title. Suddenly the calendar is readable! I’m hoping this will encourage people to stay and explore what we have to offer.

Featured events
With the switch to the wider layout we were also able to add a right-hand column that we’ll use to highlight upcoming featured events, such as the Brooklyn Ball coming up on April 23.

Permalinks and bookmarking tools
Every event now has its own permalink, to display that event and only that event. This opens up a lot of new territory for how and where we use event information. And for how you can use our event information. Taking a tip from the good folks at the Walker Art Center, we’ve added a “Share This” link below each event that lets you post it to Facebook, tweet it, or save its permalink page to a variety of social bookmarking services.

And now the small stuff. With a data-driven page like the calendar, the devil truly is in the details. These are the kind of things that individually, ultimately, should be almost invisible to anyone looking at the page, but that work together to make things feel natural. Effortless reading is what we’re aiming for here.

So, for instance, we made sure times were formatted to read the way we would say them out loud: 6—8:30 p.m. instead of 6:00 p.m.—8:30 p.m.. We moved query-specific information from its old spot at the top of the page’s main well into the page title, and programmed the titles to use more English and fewer dates. Instead of saying “Events from 4/12/2009 to 4/18/2009″ we now say “Week of April 12, 2009″.

We’ve tweaked the listing of current exhibitions to call out which events are opening and closing during the requested date range, and changed the heading on that exhibition list from “Current Exhibitions” to “On View” to reinforce the fact that the list shows what exhibitions will be open during the selected time period.

What’s new for editors
Okay, technically, it’s been about week since we finalized upgrades to the intranet tool that our editors use to manage all this event information. But I think they’ll agree that it still feels new enough to merit mentioning here.

For them, the biggest change is that the new calendar tool offers a way to batch edit groups of recurring events, like Museum Guide tours, that are offered at many different times. We also integrated some related tools for managing our lists of locations and event categories. And finally, we reorganized the main page of the calendar tool to make it easier to find the events they need to edit. All of these changes should make calendar updates go more smoothly for them.

Finally, I’ll note that the new tool was designed as an alternate interface for the same underlying data that the old tool worked off of. Of course, we added significantly to the original data structure, but we were able to keep the core unchanged. Essentially, the old tool then offered access to a subset of the data and functionality that the new tool could handle. This meant that both tools could be used simultaneously — I could use the new tool for development and testing while the editors continued to use the old tool. And it meant no data migration before launch. Which is a thing of beauty.

So, that’s it. Welcome to the new calendar. Now go explore.