Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Brooklyn Museum has just joined some of the other non-profits hosting content in the Beyond Campus area of iTunes U (tip of the hat to Despi at IMA for initial info on this). For us, the idea seemed like a good one because it allows us to host long-format content in a setting where people want to find it. Many of the Universities using iTunes U are hosting lectures and we’ve got a ton of artist talks and panel discussions, so this seemed like the right location to do it. In addition, we’ve always wanted to find an easy way our visitors could download our audio tour content right to their iPods and the iTunes U setup accomplishes this. Finally, all of our content is all in one place. We’ll still be uploading to YouTube and blip.tv as appropriate, but iTunes U gives us the ability to host everything in one location without file size and length limits.

When working with the iTunes U template, we wanted to keep our categorization as simple as possible. Most of the traffic to our own website goes to three areas: Exhibitions, Collections, and Visit. In iTunes U, you’ll find our content divided into three categories to mirror this idea. The jury is still out on if this will work for us in this venue, but we are giving it a go and keeping it simple for now. On the right hand side, we are owning the “wisdom of the crowd” and showcasing top downloaded content which seems like an interesting way to get visitors deeper into the site.

If any colleagues are thinking about doing this, feel free to give us a ring if you need any information.

Has everyone seen the fantastic work the Indianapolis Museum of Art is doing on their YouTube channel? It’s hard to miss and we’ve been watching their videos for while now in complete amazement. They’ve got a little bit of everything on their channel including staff profiles, short videos and video series from recent exhibitions and installations. I was excited to meet the folks in charge of the channel recently, Daniel Incandela and Despi Mayes, when they were visiting NYC. One of the things I love about the IMA videos is they do everything with their own in-house staff - no outside producers. It’s clear to me that there’s a lot of commitment and quality here that’s rooted in the mission of the institution. YouTube is just one part of the awesome IMA web presence. While you are at it, check out their new blog, the dashboard and the latest web feature for Breaking the Mode.

So, why am I starting this post with the IMA? Well, we just produced a short video for our exhibition © MURAKAMI and while video is not something we tend to do a lot of at the Brooklyn Museum, we are very proud of this one. “Mr. Pointy Comes to Brooklyn” was inspired by the IMA’s “LOVE MOVE“. Shot in timelapse style, our new video documents the load in and assembly of Takashi Murakami’s sculpture, Mr. Pointy, which is now on display in the Rubin Pavilion throughout the run of the exhibition. One of the things we really liked about “LOVE MOVE” was the way the IMA combined different types of footage to produce a video that could really hold your attention. We worked with the same format, combining still shots taken from the ground with timelapse shots from the roof, then shifting to a true timelapse of the sculpture being assembled.

To get some of the footage, we set up shop on the roof of one of buildings across the street from the Museum. Bob (left) and Francesca (right) almost froze up there! This part of the load in lasted all day and they shot more than 2000 images to go into the final timelapse. Those of us on the ground kept joking that they looked like snipers on the roof. Many thanks to Victor, the superintendent of the building across the street. Not only did he arrange to get us access, he provided electricity so we could power our equipment all day.

Bob hard at work and cold!

After the first day, we all got to move inside to warmer surroundings. At the same time we were shooting, Ruby Washington, a photographer from the New York Times, was here capturing shots for a piece just published in our hometown paper. Check out her great flicks in Carol Vogel’s article. We’ve also got a series of shots of our own up on Flickr if you are into the close-ups.

The view down Washington Avenue was pretty cool…note the pigeons decided to oversee the shoot!

You may notice there’s no music in the video. We really wanted to use a track from mobygratis, but we were just shy of time needed to get the approval for the track and our request is still “pending”, so it’s a bit of a silent movie right now. Once the exhibition completes its run we will have to take the video off YouTube and the flicks off Flickr, but we are thrilled we can share them with you for this limited time. Thanks to The Nugget Factory for the inspiration! Daniel, now we need advice about how to make transitions that will look good when YouTube does its compression. It looks so much better when we host it.

We are very happy everyone is logging in to evaluate submissions for Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition, but our technical resources are a bit unmatched for this kind of traffic.  If you are trying to evaluate and finding that images slow to load, hang tight.  We are working on the problem and should have more news soon.  You can login at any time during the evaluation period to finish up, so you don’t have to evaluate everything in one sitting.

We are launching the evaluation interface for Click! today, so I wanted to take this opportunity to write about some of the choices behind the design. In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki asserts that for a crowd to be wise, maintaining diversity and independence are two key factors. Both issues are talked about at length in chapters two and three of the book, but here is a small sampling to give you an idea:

“Diversity helps because it actually adds perspectives that would otherwise be absent and because it takes away, or at least weakens, some of the destructive characteristics of group decision making.”

“Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. […] Second, independent individuals are more likely to have new information rather than the same old data everyone is already familiar with. The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. ” (more…)

One of the biggest challenges we face with an exhibition like Click! is getting the word out. Click! depends on two types of participation, initial submissions from the artist community and participation from the online community who will evaluate those submissions. Getting to word out to the artist community is critical and that means we’ve been doing a lot of leg work.

Physical card distribution is still a major method of communication throughout the Brooklyn communities. Many of the local mom-and-pop establishments like cafes and bookstores have a place for card drops and announcements. As you can see, we printed a lot of cards, so we’ve been working to get them into the neighborhoods. Happily and with the help of many staff who have taken a bunch to their local hangouts, we are now down to two small stacks!

Since this is a photography show, it seemed like a good idea put announcements in all the Brooklyn-based groups on Flickr. Instead of just posting, we wrote the administrators of each group to ask permission to do so. The admins were great about getting back to us and our postings are now in place. For those of you who have never seen the Brooklyn groups on Flickr, there’s a great online community there, so spend some time checking it out.

In addition to Flickr, there’s a strong blogging community in Brooklyn and we’ve been sending information their way. To get an idea of how large and active this community is, take a look at the blogroll at The Gowanus Lounge. Also of interest, the Brooklyn blogging community hosts a monthly blogade.

And that’s not all. There are many artist collectives in Brooklyn that we’ve been contacting and, in turn, they’ve been sending notification e-mails to their lists of artists. In addition, there are photo documentation projects for certain areas and we’ve been contacting the people running them. Take a look at What’s The Hook? and the Coney Island Documentation Project for great examples.

So, this post is a bit of thanks to all those who have helped us get the word out about our open call. If you’ve sent out e-mails, allowed us to post to your Flickr group, accepted cards, installed our widget, posted to your blog - thank you! We couldn’t do this without your help and we are happy to be neighbors!

Following up on this earlier post, our new video has just been published to our YouTube feed. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this project!

For the past several months, we’ve been working with filmmaker Matt Wolf on an upcoming video project. The video is in the final stages of editing, but I wanted to take a moment to write about the process. When we first met with Matt, he had the idea to do a rapid-fire combine of visitor portraits and objects in the collection. Because his vision was so closely tied to our mission (which considers the visitor experience paramount), we thought it might be an interesting twist if the collection photography used in piece was actually taken by our visitors.

We had been running a Brooklyn Museum Flickr group and had always been thrilled by the diversity and the quality of the shots that had been submitted to the group over the years. For the video, we selected 10 photographers who had been part of our Flickr community to participate by photographing areas of the permanent collection. Similar to our earlier Visitor Video Competition, one of the most interesting elements became how each photographer captured objects in a distinctly different way. As shots started to come in for review, I kept finding myself really looking at objects again and noticing how different the photography differed from our own. Objects that I see every day, took on new life and we hope these different takes will help show off the museum in a new way in the final video. (more…)

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.

Lessons learned post about the Visitor Video Competition for all the colleagues out there who might be thinking of doing something similar. (more…)