Eugene Wemlinger. Brooklyn Museum, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, ca. 1903-1910. Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection, 1996.164.10-32.

This huge collection of more than 3500 glass and film negatives has had a pretty peripatetic life, even before its current digital excursions. So, here’s a little of the history behind this 21st century project.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 24, 1898

It seems likely that some parts of the collection are the remnants on the late 19th-century collections of the Department of Photography of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, the Museum’s parent organization. George Bradford Brainerd – one of the photographers represented in the glass negative collection — was a member of the Institute’s Photography Department. While the Museum itself didn’t appoint a Photography curator until 1982, we did have a photography studio charged with documenting the art collections as early as 1909. Museum photographer Herman de Wetter, hired in 1934, had curatorial aspirations and began collecting photographs, both historical and contemporary; cataloging the photograph collections already in the Museum; and organizing exhibitions. In 1953, Eye to Eye, the bulletin of the Graphic History Society of America, described nine historical photograph collections at the Brooklyn Museum.

Despite the popularity of the images – they may be seen in many mid-century publications on Brooklyn history – the Museum administration was dubious about committing to photography as part of the art collections. In 1955, shortly after the Director returned the Photography Studio to a service-only mission, the Brooklyn negatives were donated to the Brooklyn Public Library.

Negative collections, especially glass negative collections, are notoriously difficult to store, manage, and provide access to. The negatives are fragile and heavy. Without printing the negatives, it’s very difficult to actually view the images. Photographs are traditionally cataloged at the item level, a time-consuming process. Once BPL’s Brooklyn Collection had printed them (a project they took on in the 1980s), the glass negatives themselves became a burden to preserve.

Collection of glass plate negatives in Brooklyn Museum art storage area.

The Brooklyn Museum’s Photography Curator, Barbara Millstein, still saw them as a treasure, though, and instigated efforts to bring the negatives back under the Museum’s care. In 1996 this was accomplished: the negatives were trucked back up the hill, checked by Conservation staff, rehoused in archival boxes and sleeves, and catalog worksheets created.

The collection, with negatives at the Museum and reference prints at BPL, now has a joint credit line: Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection.

Prepping a negative for scanning (Lisa Adang, Digital Lab)

A recent IMLS grant allowed Digital Lab staff to convert the catalog sheets into database records in the Museum’s collections database and make a start at digitizing the images. Nearly 400 images are now on the Museum’s website and on Flickr, with more scanning underway. The beauty of the Digital Age is that it doesn’t really matter where the actual objects reside – they’re as easily accessible in Breukelen (NL) as in Brooklyn.

What now? Crowd sourcing the research needed to expand and correct the titles and place the images on the map. Bringing the data, tags, comments, and corrections full circle, back to the Museum’s collections pages. Members of the Flickr and Twitter community have been pitching in to geotag the images. People are talking, working together, and solving mysteries. Stay tuned! Research a few mysteries yourself!

Indian. Page from an Astrological Treatise, ca. 1750. Opaque watercolor on paper, sheet: 7 3/4 x 4 1/2 in. (19.7 x 11.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, 71.120

There’s an Elephant in the Library.
Organizers Promise It Will Never Forget.
Hathi (pronounced hah-tee) is the Hindi word for elephant.

Enter copyright. Many of the books in the database are available only as “limited — search only” records. Hathi Trust books that fall into the Public Domain are automatically available, but everything after 1923 has to be researched and copyright cleared…OR…the copyright holder has to grant permission.

You’ve probably noticed that a lot of the content on the Brooklyn Museum website is licensed under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license. HathiTrust now offers that option to rights holders. It was a natural for us to jump in and offer pre-1990 Brooklyn Museum and Brooklyn Institute publications under CC terms, too. More recent books will come online gradually, as they go out of print and the stock dwindles (yes, we still want to sell books).  And books that we co-published are going to take some legwork to acquire permission from partners.

There’s a lot to dig into, from Charles Edwin Wilbour’s Travels in Egypt (1880-1891) to John I.H. Baur’s 1940 Eastman Johnson catalog to Linda Ferber’s 1973 work on William Trost Richards.

Thomas Pollack Anshutz (American, 1851-1912). Boy Reading: Ned Anshutz, ca. 1900. Oil on canvas, 38 1/16 x 27 1/16 in. (96.7 x 68.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 67.135

A book is still a beautiful thing — these don’t have their pretty covers and the illustrations can be…hmm…less than optimal — but there’s a lot to be said for being able to dive in and READ whenever you want. We hope that you’ll enjoy this new resource, but that you’ll also visit your library (or ours)  to hold these treasures in your hands.

Tell us what you’re reading!

“Any analysis of ownership and duration must be performed on a case-by-case basis for each work.”
Copyright & Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for U.S. Libraries, Archives & Museums.
Peter Hirtle, Emily Hudson and Andrew T. Kenyon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, 2009)

Given this statement, from some of the best authorities in the field, we faced a dilemma:

• We have tens of thousands of objects in the Museum collection.
• We want to put the entire collection on line so people will have access to both data and images, even if they’re only thumbnails, likely to fall within the Fair Use exception to copyright protection.
• We want to be clear about rights, not just for our purposes (we acquire a license when we want to use an object that’s protected by copyright), but to communicate clearly and honestly with members of the community.
• However, we don’t always have all of the information needed to identify artists or the dates of the works, and may never be able to acquire all of the needed data. We may have to make our best guess. Works of art are not like books: they don’t have the author and publication date printed on the title page and “publication,” necessary for analyzing copyright status, is not as clear cut for works of art as it is for books.

Our solution:

• Paint with broad strokes, dividing the collection into under copyright and no known copyright (i.e. we think it’s in the public domain) using broad rules of thumb:

• Work created before 1923: no known copyright restrictions
• Work created from 1923 to the present: under copyright, even though copyright may have expired. Someone with the time and resources to do detailed, case-by-case research may be able to clear the work
• Anonymous artists: works created before 1890: no known copyright restrictions.
• Brooklyn Museum photographs of three-dimensional works not protected by copyright: Creative Commons license

• Open the website to comment and draw on community knowledge to correct and refine.
• Err on the side of protecting artists’ rights.
• Use thumbnails, likely to fall within the Fair Use exception to copyright protection, whenever a work may be protected by copyright.
• Take the risk to get the information out there (but include language from the Museum counsel so that it’s clear we’re not providing legal advice)
• Provide links to authoritative resources on copyright.
• Collaborate with other museums and groups interested in art and image copyright.

Some sample records:
no known copyright restrictions
under copyright
under copyright, license obtained
three-dimensional work, Creative Commons license
status unknown, research required

On the other side of the coin, there’s a huge community hungry for images that they can use for a million different projects – websites, blogs, school papers, art projects, mashups. They’re willing to pay attention to whether an image is in the public domain or not, but they don’t always understand what that means, and the institutions with the images rarely provide useful guidance (see paragraph 1).

My book shelf: I’ve been doing a LOT of reading, both books and on line. 

Over the past several months, Brooklyn Museum staff members have been wrestling with this problem. We respect artists’ rights and are working on contacting artists and their estates for our entire Contemporary Art collection. (Arlene Yu will talk about that more in a later blog post.) We also want to be as open and transparent as possible with our community about the images we provide on our website.

Our first decision was to provide at least thumbnail images of all art works on our website, as allowed under the fair use exemption in copyright law, and to include an explanatory “why is this image so small” for objects under copyright. The next step was to provide more information on everything else. Is the work in the public domain (“no known copyright restrictions”) or protected by copyright? Is it a three-dimensional work, where the Museum holds copyright to our images but not the work? Are rights to the work controlled by a licensing agency?

In order to accomplish this, we needed to sort through the entire collection database and assign rights types, no small task. Is the work two dimensional or three dimensional? When was the work created? With the categories established, we’re now ready to start sharing our work with our community. We ended up simplifying things greatly, lumping all “under copyright” and “could be under copyright, depending” objects together. If you have the time to do deeper research and the legal expertise to analyze what you find, you may well identify works that are already in the public domain. We’d rather err on the side of artists rights than the opposite.

Now that we’ve included all of this information on the collections pages, I’m hoping that members of our community will jump in and help with the project, just like they have on Flickr Commons. If you have more information about our artists (are you one of them?) — get in touch! If you think we’ve gotten something wrong, let us know and we’ll fix it. This is all a starting point, not legal opinion, that we hope will lead to clearer, more useful rights information.

I’ll be providing more detailed information about the project in future blog postings. Stay tuned for a post on our guidelines and I’m thinking about digging into the publication history of some works in the collection to show what it really takes to declare something “public domain.” Let me know if there are topics you’d like to hear about (keeping in mind that I am very definitely NOT a lawyer). We hope that you’ll find this work in progress both interesting and a step in the right direction.

“The pipeline opens.”

Back in 2005, when we first started talking about digital imaging, I kept envisioning a giant pipeline pouring out images onto my office floor (at 3AM, of course). OK, we’ve got that under control – everything’s now pouring into the DAMS pretty smoothly – AND images are now flowing out to the Museum’s Collection on the Web pages. More importantly, they do so without anybody throwing a switch, copying image files, or writing captions, which brings me to image #2:

“Plays well together.”

It’s not a cliché to say that everything is interconnected. Our DAMS and Collection on the Web projects couldn’t happen without both human and application interactions. The web of collaboration engages people throughout the Museum to the community beyond, from the start of workflow when an image is requested, to the tagging, mashups, commentary, and glossy publications once it’s out in the world. And it’s not just people: our Luna DAMS talks to TMS (our collections management system) and vice versa; our website applications talk to both as well as to content management data sources. Not to speak of Flickr, MySpace, and beyond.

“What’s ‘The Collection’?”

Like most museums, we have a great deal of great “stuff” that extends beyond the formal collection: collections of documentary photographs; special collections in the libraries and archives; scrapbooks, letters, receipts, photographs, and other documents that came to the Museum along with an accessioned object. Curators, librarians, and archivists can’t resist these materials, which help tell the story of the collection.

How the Museum grew over the years and how we presented and interpreted the objects is part of the story that can be told with materials from the Museum Archives: pictures of the building and its galleries; views of exhibition installations; press releases and other historical documents. We’ve already launched our exhibition images on the Web (a project I worked on with HTML babysteps years ago); today’s release of a cross-section of archives and library materials is just the start of offerings that will let you build connections across the collection.

“You’ve got to love data to do this job.”

Building a DAMS isn’t all about the pictures—if that was the case, we could just throw the images up and say “browse.” You have to be able to find the image you want and, if you’re on the working side of the equation, you’ve got to manage great masses of image files. The data-crunchers in the Digital Lab link every image to basic “metadata,” object data comes from TMS, and our dedicated Web community provide tags, item by item. It’s a lot of steps by a lot of people…more on imaging and data workflow in my next post.

Bruce Cratsley (American, 1944–1998). Brooklyn Bridge Centennial Fireworks, 1983.
Gelatin silver print. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Billy Leight, 1996.167. © Bruce Cratsley

There’s a long tradition of fireworks over the Brooklyn Bridge, from its opening in 1883 to the centennial in 1983, and I’d venture to guess that every one of them has been captured by artists. A few years ago, we digitized everything we could find in the Museum collection that had to do with the Brooklyn Bridge, including some wonderful fireworks images. Take a look at The Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn Museum: Spanning Art and History.

There must be thousands (millions?) of photographs around from the last big celebration in 1983, in shoeboxes, slide carousels, and all of other analog places. This time, though, it’s going to be easier to share all of the digital images sure to be created during the 5-day celebration. Join our Brooklyn Bridge (Brooklyn Museum Web site) Group on Flickr and add your amazing fireworks images to the more than 900 images of “our” bridge on Flickr and linked to the Brooklyn Bridge pages on Museum website.

Anyone who did photography in the pre-digital days and spent time in the darkroom remembers the magic of developing and printing with a great deal of fondness, even as we conveniently forget the lingering smell of chemicals in our clothes and hair. Digital is a new kind of magic, but I suspect that there will always be photographers who develop and print their own images. It’ll continue to be an art.

The Brooklyn Museum has had a darkroom for decades–as early as the 1930s–so it was a bittersweet farewell both to well-worn enlargers that had seen many decades of use and to more recent equipment like film and print processors. We were able to sell most of the equipment and supplies (in the process helping to fund new digital cameras) and also donated some to educational programs — Stickball Printmedia Arts, the photographic program at The Drew Hamilton Learning Center of the Children’s Aid Society, and Bard College‘s Photography Department.

We found ourselves at the end of the process with the highest-tech, newest enlarger still in storage. The Zone VI enlarger would handle 5×7 and 8×10 negatives and was definitely professional grade–not something that students or hobbyists would find useful. What to do? Our last-ditch ad on photo.net brought just a few inquiries. Photographer Michael Halsband came by looking for some parts for his Zone VI and got intrigued. The Museum’s Zone VI enlarger is now in his studio and is being readied for use by visiting Cuban photographers sponsored by the American Friends of the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba. A donation that made all of us very happy–and I can’t think of a more fitting coda to our darkroom project, especially just as Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art is about to open. Michael’s comment says it all: “it is very cool to have the enlarger come from the Brooklyn Museum and continue to be used to for creative work. ”

I wish I had some photos of Michael disassembling the enlarger and packing it into his car. A Zone VI is really large and complicated , but he made the process look easy. Photographers never cease to amaze me with their ability to deal with any kind of equipment — on top of taking amazing pictures. Not having any Rube Goldberg Zone VI candids to offer, here’s an offering from our amazing photography collection, a candid from another time:

George Bradford Brainerd (American, 1845-87).
Solution of Dinner Question at the Conduit at Hempstead. Brooklyn Museum, X894.148

Digital asset. The easiest way to think about a digital asset is to simply think, “file.” Most likely an image file for the sake of this discussion, but could be an audio, video, PDF, or graphics file — just about anything in digital format. We call them “assets” to call attention to the fact that it costs money to create them and because they have value to the person or organization that created them. (Besides, DIMS or DFMS just don’t have the same ring as acronyms.) They cost us money to store and back up, too, so we’d better manage them efficiently. If you don’t manage your files, you end up with 5 copies of the same big TIF file scattered around the network, with everybody hoarding their copies because they can’t count on finding them again when they need them.

Management System. When you hit a critical mass of image files (the 10K I talked about yesterday is a pretty effective one to push you into action), you really need a sophisticated database to manage the files and the data that describe both the files (technical metadata) and their contents (descriptive metadata). The system should store and keep track of the master files for you, so you don’t have to set up and manage file storage — there’s only so far you can go with even the most logical folder structure.

You need a good, clear, workable interface where people can work with the images and data–view images, download the size they need for their current project, and upload revised versions. They also need to be able to load their own image files — everybody has a digital camera and a scanner these days.

And then look beyond the individual worker bee at his/her desk, pulling up images for the latest project–when it comes to sending images and data out on the Web, a strong, well organized database is going to make the Web programmer’s work 1000% easier.

And it has to do all of these things without making the network folks blow a fuse. Working on DAMS is going to give you a real sense of what collaboration means.

Most of us have a sense of this with our own image files at home. We started with a handful of files that grew to the point that we were loading things onto CDs, flash drives, and external hard drives. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to find things and share them in the blink of the eye? Get a caption and know who shot the photo and when, without having to get on the phone and use the by-guess-and-by-golly method of data creation? Enter Web services like Flickr and other online services for personal use and the “industrial strength” management systems that we call DAMS for organizations like your friendly neighborhood museum.

You can bet that the administration heard this and more when we pitched DAMS to them. Now we just need to provide proof of the pudding. All in good time. If you want to see more details about what we were and are looking for in a DAMS, click on the “more” link below, but for now, in celebration of the impending 4th of July holiday, here’s my image offering for this post:

Mitchell Tapper (American, born 1953). Fireworks over Brooklyn Bridge, 1983. 83.208.
For this and more great Brooklyn Bridge images, see our digital collection (done without the help of a DAMS, and boy could we have used one), The Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn Museum: Spanning Art and History. Our BB community pool on Flickr doesn’t have anything tagged fireworks — get busy, friends!

Brooklyn Museum: Desired DAMS capabilities

• MySQL, POSTGRESQL or MSSQL database
• use LDAP/Kerberos for authentication against existing Active Directory database
• access to database for data and image export purposes
• ability to map data to and from other databases
• simple and clear method of organizing file storage; automatic placement in imageserver
• ability to program batch data loads and batch image loads with associated metadata
• batch and/or automatic creation of derivatives from a master file at standard or custom file specifications
• ability to handle a wide variety of image file types; ideally also other file types such as doc, PDF, Quark, InDesign; also video such as Quicktime
• highly granular and flexible permissions structure, including
  • individual and group permissions;
  • lock or release individual records and groups of records to individuals/groups/public;
  • control access (view/edit) to metadata at the field level;
  • limit access to specific file types to a specific group (i.e. TIFFs only accessible to limited audience)
• strong descriptive metadata structure, ideally offering
  • templates for standard metadata sets such as Dublin Core, VRA Core;
  • ability to create and/or import pick lists and thesauri
  • set required fields
  • set default values
  • create user-defined fields with permission
  • global update of data with permission
  • create data entry templates
• strong technical metadata structure with
  • ability to record data at the individual file level, including
  • automatic loading of file header data (source camera/scanner; resolution; date; color space, etc.);
  • ability to set session defaults (name of operator, equipment settings, etc.)
• ability to link multiple image files to a single record (i.e. one master image, with multiple derivatives and edited versions)
• ability to link related records
  • multi-part objects-4 views of a single sculpture;
  • a screen that has 3 panels, each a separate digital image
  • image of an object in the collection, a document with text relating to it, a Quark file of wall text
• ability to express a hierarchical structure and the sequence of images within it
  • a book with chapters, sections, and pages;
  • an archival collection with series, subseries, folders, and items
• ability to create ad hoc groupings of assets for projects (i.e. works that will be included in an exhibition)
• ability to create “placeholder” metadata records where images will be added later
• canned and custom output formats for selected images and metadata
  • PowerPoint presentation
  • HTML page
  • Word/PDF document
  • XML output template
• canned and custom administrative reporting
  • data and image load statistics
  • use statistics
  • system reports

Two years ago, I was working in the Museum Archives, where we were busily scanning hundreds, then thousands of images. Once we started approaching ten thousand, it became clear that our bulging Access databases weren’t going to be a long term answer. That’s when I first encountered “DAMS” — and our new goal — a Digital Asset Management System. And so did others around the Museum: our photographers, the rights & reproductions person, our network managers. Others didn’t realize they wanted a DAMS. They just needed images, images, images. Right now!

It’s been a long road (think Wizard of Oz), but we’re finally in the first steps of implementation. Getting there, we talked to everyone around the Museum and to people in other museums who were setting out on the same road, investigated every commercial system out there, scheduled demos, tested some systems, set up a manual system to tide us over as our digital image collections continued to grow — more than 35,000 image of works of art to date. Most of the systems were developed either for big media corporations or for libraries, not museums, so a lot of the things we wanted to do either couldn’t be done or would take big work arounds. Other museums were finding out the same thing, as we discovered in a session at the Museum Computer Network meeting in Pasadena: Get the Picture: Experiences in Selecting and Implementing Digital Asset Management Systems in Museums. This is definitely the first generation of DAMS for museums. They’re bound to improve (I’ve been around long enough to remember when word processing programs required you to insert “dot commands” for formatting, so I have faith in progress…).

So here’s where we are now: we contracted with Luna Imaging for their Insight software, installed and configured it (a process that took longer than we expected), and have started to figure out how to apply the metadata template we designed (CDWA-Lite plus administrative and technical fields) in this environment. Our goal is to import data describing works of art from TMS (The Museum System, our collections management system) and create the image metadata in Luna. This is more complicated than we had hoped, but the good news is that Luna staff have done just this as a “services” project in the past, so we’re confident that our programmer will be able to work it out with the help of support staff.

And the objects in the Museum collection aren’t the only thing we want to get a handle on: we have upwards of 10,000 exhibition views, already online in simple html pages; Library, Archives, and Special Collections materials; views of the Museum building, people, and events; and all the thousands of images curators have collected over the years.

The point of all of this, of course, is to get it out there. The Museum has amazing collections and we’ve gradually started adding more images to the Museum website, both on the collections pages and our Brooklyn Bridge project. The DAMS will make it easier to share more with our online community.

As we speak, Shelley Bernstein and the rest of the IS staff are “laying the rails” for getting our image riches out there to the Web. Over the next months, I’ll try to post regular updates on what we’re thinking, what we’ve accomplished, and where we stand. If I descend too far into jargon, just comment and I’ll clarify. There was a time when I didn’t know what DAMS, metadata, CDWA, Dublin Core, and on and on meant, either.

Being an imaging maven, it would be ironic not to include a picture in my posts, so I’ll try to pick something interesting, beautiful, or amusing each time. Today, since it’s beautiful outside and I’m thinking about heading down to the water when I’m done here, it’s one of our amazing Audubon bird prints: