Google Art Project 2 launched this morning at Musée d'Orsay. There were dozens of museum colleagues waiting for their institution to show up on screen for this photo op. It was kind of hilarious.

Google launched the second round of the Project this morning at the Musée d’Orsay giving the press and museum reps a tour of what’s new. Last year, Art Project was launched with 17 museums in 9 countries, 400 artists and 1000 works of art.  In round two, the project has grown to include 151 museums in 40 countries with 6000 artists and 32,000 works. Interestingly, only 20 of the museums are in the United States, so what’s in the Art Project now is much more representative of the international museum scene.  There are a couple of really interesting features—you can search across institutions, you can filter by medium and you can create your own collection.

Collection objects from the Brooklyn Museum in Google Art Project.

Our contribution consists of images from almost 1000 collection objects; for launch we selected objects that were currently on view at the Museum, were clear of copyright issues and had publication quality images.  To get them to Google, our API was used to fetch the data (thanks, Piotr) and was paired with images that Deb Wythe grabbed from our Digital Asset Management System. Having both systems in place allowed us to join the Art Project less than a month ago and get a sizable amount of data there very quickly.

It was sort of interesting to watch the slides during Google’s presentation this morning.  As I sat there, up popped our Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington and I snagged a photo thinking, “that’s ours!”

Is this the Brooklyn Museum portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart...or...?

I started wondering if it really was the Brooklyn Museum version of that painting…Gilbert Stuart was known for painting George Washington quite a bit and our own text on the web and in-gallery says as much.  Sure enough, a quick search in Google Art Project revealed three similar versions—one from the National Portrait Gallery, one from The White House and our own.  Now you can see them all together—at least together online—and that’s one of the great things about Art Project’s expansion.

A search for Gilbert Stuart in Google Art Project shows similar works side by side.

Go explore and see what you find.

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!

This summer, with the help of Connie Jang, an intern with the Digital Collections department (and incomparable prep work by Katie Apsey, our Curatorial Assistant, and a loaned photo backdrop from the Egyptian offices), I’ve started a photo survey of one of our most important sub-collections of African objects—the significant number of works acquired by our curator Stewart Culin during a 1922 Museum-sponsored collecting expedition to Europe. While on this trip, Culin purchased several important pieces from William Oldman and Paul Guillaume, pioneering art dealers in London and Paris, respectively, before making his way to Brussels. There, Culin was introduced to an obscure employee of a local veterinary school named François Poncelet who, through means as yet unknown, had amassed a collection of over 1500 pieces, mostly from the Congo. Culin managed to acquire the entire collection for around $2,000—twice his initial budget, but a shrewd investment, as time has told. In addition to being the foundation for the Museum’s African collection, and the subject of the groundbreaking 1923 exhibition Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Congo, this sub-collection is a crucial historical artifact in its own right, reflecting the creation and circulation of Congolese art at a specific (and comparatively early) time and place.

Single Head Goblet (Mbwoongntey), early 20th century. Wood, 8 1/16 x 3 1/2 in. (20.5 x 9.0 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum Expedition 1922, Robert B. Woodward Memorial Fund, 22.1485.

Many of these works have not been previously photographed, and this has also served as a crucial opportunity to review and update our records on these works. Every day in the store room brings with it a new discovery, and I look forward to sharing them with our visitors as the project progresses. You can keep an eye on our progress, by visiting this link.

“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

This has happened as we’ve found and contacted artists (or their heirs or other rightsholders), getting permission from them to share their work online, a project I worked on in spring 2009 as an intern in Digital Collections and Services. The work has become necessary as we’ve found ways to share our collection on the Web. As a cultural heritage institution we believe it’s our duty not only to make our collections available to the widest possible audience, but also to respect the intellectual property rights of others, as well as to set an example and provide some education about copyright in works of art.

But copyright in general – particularly when it comes to art—is a complicated subject these days. You have only to look at what is considered by many in the museums/libraries/archives world to be the authoritative copyright guide to see how many different considerations come into play when determining if a particular work is still under copyright, let alone who holds that right. In addition, for older works of art, there is often no way for us to tell when, or even if, a work of art was ever “published” in the legal sense of the term, and thus under which copyright “rule” it should fall. And copyright continues to be a matter of debate in the courts, so even the go-to chart doesn’t have all the answers.

What’s our answer? It’s not perfect. We’ve opted to take what we consider to be a conservative approach: even though some would argue that our posting of images of works online is an example of fair use, we’re seeking explicit permission from artists, in the form of nonexclusive licenses, in order to post anything bigger than a thumbnail. We’ve also tried to balance a respect for copyright with what is actually possible for us to achieve, since there’s no army of lawyers specializing in intellectual property at our disposal!

So we’ve decided to consider anything created after 1922 to be under copyright, even though many works may not actually still be protected. We’ve also decided to approach artists and ask for blanket permission for works created after 1922—again, even though many works may not actually still be protected. Deb is going to blog a bit more about our working guidelines coming up next.

With these guidelines, we were able to whittle down the number of works needing clearance to about 19,000, and the number of artists/heirs to about 4,300. Since January 2008, six part-time interns have worked on getting clearance, and each intern was allowed to define the artist pool she tried to reach. The intern before me, for example, focused on artists from the early 20th century with more than 50 works in our collection, while I researched artists who were included in our 2007 acquisitions. We’ve cleared about 2,500 works to date.

The work is slow going, despite our success rate. The amount of work we have to do for each artist isn’t dependent on the number of works she created, but on how hard it is to find her and how willing she is to respond. With our collections on the Web we have to specify that images may be used worldwide (which can ring alarm bells for anyone concerned with licensing), and we’ve tried to future-proof the license by including any media that have not yet been invented (another possible alarm bell). So even though we’re asking for a nonexclusive license which leaves the artist free to pursue other opportunities; even though our license only authorizes us to do things which are in keeping with our educational mission; even though as an established museum you’d think we should be trusted to maintain an artist’s legacy (that’s presumably why we acquired the works in the first place); even though other, more detailed images of the artist’s works may already be all over the Web, we still encounter suspicion. I suppose it’s not surprising in a world where a well-intentioned lexicon of the Harry Potter world is subjected to a lawsuit.

Although the word “copyright” might evoke boredom (or fear or anguish, as the Harry Potter case suggests), the work has actually been really interesting. Sometimes the search for an artist is as simple as Googling her name and finding her website; sometimes it takes a triangulation of information from various databases as I use the artist’s current age from one database, biographical information found elsewhere about where she’s lived, and last known address from a third source to find her through yet a fourth phone directory. At times our own library will yield a nugget from a newspaper clipping about the artist’s wife or children (or lack thereof). And together with this sleuthing I’ve had to keep track of where every artist we’ve researched is in the clearance process, plus follow up if necessary (with the appropriate amount of diplomacy).

Gary Alan Bukovnik (American, born 1947). Rhododendrum, 1980. Lithograph Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, 81.15.2. © Gary Alan Bukovnik

Responses from artists have varied as widely as the work itself. Estates and heirs are often reluctant to grant us the broad permissions we seek. Maybe they’re concerned we will damage the artist’s legacy, though that hardly seems in keeping with our mission. Sometimes they’re commercial enterprises interested in making money off of that legacy. Living artists also run the gamut from ignoring us entirely to promising to sign and send the license back, but apparently never getting around to it, to returning a signed license the very next day. In one of our happier experiences, Gary Bukovnik recently sent an e-mail thanking us for “the experience of re-living those pieces on the list which I have long forgotten!…This was a very pleasant surprise waiting for me in today’s mail.”

But at our rate of progress we have a long way to go – 4,000 artists – so if you see a small image of a big work of art on our site and you know how to locate the artist or her heirs, please let us know (copyright@brooklynmuseum.org)!

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.

We’ve been toiling over an ongoing project to better identify the rights status of objects in our online collection, so with World’s Fair Use Day it seemed like an appropriate  week to start blogging about these significant changes and launch this project into the wild.

Starting today, each object on the Museum’s collections pages will have information on its rights status, including those that are understood to be under no known copyright.  Also included is information to clarify what we mean by a certain rights type and, importantly, links to further information about copyright.  We are asking members of our community to comment and e-mail if they can provide more information about artists, corrections if they think we’ve gotten it wrong, and generally participating in our ongoing efforts. The addition of this information will be a starting point for dialog that we hope will lead to clearer, more useful rights information in our collection online.

Images that are licensed Creative Commons or are “no known copyright restrictions” can now be queried from the advanced search on our website.  All rights types are integrated into the Brooklyn Museum API, providing greater flexibility in getting to this new data. Lastly, we’ve taken one more baby step in the ongoing direction of opening up more content—with images and text that we own the copyright to, we’ve changed our default Creative Commons license on the site from a CC-BY-NC-ND to a CC-BY-NC, to allow for greater re-use of materials.

Over the next few days, we’ve got some blog posts coming about the specifics—stay tuned for posts from from Deborah Wythe, Head of Digital Collections and Services and Arlene Yu, an intern working with her.  Please be sure to read the whole series if this subject interests you.

If you are a fan of the The Commons on Flickr and live in the NYC area, come to our Common Ground meetup this weekend to celebrate—we’ve got tons and tons of neato stuff to give away!  The folks from the NYPL are going to be joining us to meet and greet and answer questions about the fantastic images being uploaded to The Commons.  We’ll be running a really big slideshow curated by the Flickr community in the lobby, so come find us this Saturday October 3rd, 6-9:30 pm!  That’s smack dab in the middle of a fabulous opera-inspired Target First Saturday, so there will be lots to do here that evening.

Don’t forget, this is a global meetup, check out these other venues if you live closer to these areas:

Sydney, Australia. A bit jealous of our colleagues over at the Powerhouse Museum who have been making preparations all week for an outdoor slideshow on the facade of their building.  The Powerhouse peeps are teaming up with the State Library of New South Wales for a joint event.

Brisbane, Australia. The State Library of Queensland is also presenting the slideshow outdoors on their Queensland Terrace—one of my personal favorite buildings in all of Australia is the Queensland Library, so that should be an amazing event in a great location!

Canberra, Australia. The Australian War Memorial is also taking part with a projection in their orientation gallery.

Safety Harbor and Tallahassee, Florida. The State Archives of Florida are running two events in the area.

Rochester, New York. George Eastman House is hosting an event in their theatre and that means you can meet Ryan…he’s the one we have to thank for the slideshow because he did a ton of work programming the voting tool and the slideshow via the Flickr API.  Thanks, Ryan!

Corvalis, Oregon. Don’t miss the photograph on this event listing—these Oregon peeps have a sense of Flickr-humor and we love them for it.

…but perhaps the Swedish National Heritage Board has us all beat!   They are hosting their event in the Medieval St. Karin Church ruin in central Visby on the island of Gotland, Sweden.  That very same church ruin is actually pictured in one of the photographs they’ve uploaded to The Commons.  It kind of doesn’t get more meta than that!

Coming to a meetup?  Tweet using the #CommonGround hashtag and if you upload photos to Flickr, tag them CommonGround2009 and we’d love to see them added to The Commons group.  Hope to meet you there!