This is more than a little overwhelming for us, but we’ve just been notified that the Brooklyn Museum has won a 2008 Forrester Groundswell Award in the Social Impact category. I won’t go into how great the book is—Nina has done a great job of that already, but it is more than cool to be recognized in this way by the very people who wrote the textbook of good example. If you haven’t already, go grab a copy and you’ll see why this is so insanely awesome. The competition this year was crazy—151 entries (finalists here) and as a non-profit, we couldn’t be more proud to be among the winners. Here’s what the judges had to say:

Social Impact

Brooklyn Museum for all three entries:

* ArtShare Facebook App
* Brooklyn Museum’s Click Exhibition
* Brooklyn Museum Posse

“Among many companies using social technologies for the greater good, we recognized a little museum in New York, the Brooklyn Museum. Why? Because of the multiple ways they have used social technologies to put their visitors in charge. They created a Facebook application in which 2,000 people identified and shared the bits of art in the museum that they liked best. They created a community curated exhibit – 3,000 people chose which art pieces to put on display, based on a total of 400,000 votes. And the museum has put the whole collection online, where the community tags it with identifying terms, allowing you to see pieces of art similar to the ones you like, or on specific topics. ”

Thank you to everyone around here who makes these initiatives possible—trust me, it would be hard to name almost everyone in the Brooklyn Museum—just know this very much a group effort around here and, by group, I mean every department. Thank you Forrester peeps and thanks to everyone out there who has been installing our Facebook app, participating in Click! and becoming a member of the Posse to work with our Collection online—most of all, it has been amazing to see what you’ve been bringing to these projects.

Changes to better integrate with Facebook’s look and feel:

A while back, Facebook adjusted user profiles so they would look less cluttered. Those adjustments made all but the most used applications go into hiding on a person’s profile and that practically killed ArtShare’s growth rate. Most people add ArtShare when they see it on a friend’s profile, so once the app could no longer be seen, our install rate decreased significantly. This initial clutter clean-up was a stop-gap until Facebook could launch bigger changes to the profile design and these larger changes were what we were waiting for. With FB’s full redesign, we’ve adjusted ArtShare so the user can place the app back on their Wall (the profile’s main page). That’s a good thing, but since it’s an action people will have to take, we know there may be a questionable response rate. Still, being able to put it back on the main page will help a lot for those that decide they want it there (and allowing the user the control to do what they want is always a good thing—even if they don’t want it on their wall).

So, yay, we’ve got ArtShare back on the main page, but we had to redesign the look of it (above) to get that to work. Facebook has a strict size limit on the box that can be displayed on your Wall and strict sizes are a nightmare for works of art—suddenly everything was getting automatically cropped in really bad ways. To work around this, we went with thumbnails in the new layout that click to the larger works and descriptions. I think we are all a little back and forth on the way this turned out, but this is the compromise we made to get it there and we are stuck with Facebook’s limitations. **If you find yourself missing those larger images, we enabled the application tab feature, so you can create a tab (below) for ArtShare and display all the work you’ve selected in full size—back to yay! Try this – it rocks!

Also, if you are running ArtShare on a Facebook page, the old layout will still apply—a good thing if you are using this on your institution’s page.

Changes to better accommodate artists:

ArtShare has always been used by many artists to share their work. In the previous version, artists could upload work and share it with their friends, but in the new version we’ve made artist uploads global. Now anyone can upload their work and share it with anyone who’s installed ArtShare. This is one of the earliest changes we wanted to make and one of the most fundamental. From the first day, we felt this application should be open to all and allowing artist uploads to become global was a key factor in fulfilling this idea.

Changes to better accommodate institutions:

We now have 26 institutions using the application. Adding all of them was taking too much time, so we’ve overhauled how we do this on the back end. The app scales better now and this means I can add a new museum in about 60 seconds—double yay! We had a lot of people patiently waiting throughout the summer while we made these changes, so many thanks (we know the waiting was a total bummer). On a personal note, one of the new institutions sharing work is the Houston Museum of Natural Science and since I grew up in Houston and was constantly in this place as a kid, it’s pretty fun to see them in ArtShare.

As ArtShare grew, you might have noticed wading through each individual institution to see work was getting cumbersome, so we’ve now got a “view all” area—it may take a while to load, but you can see everything in one place. Eventually we will implement a search function, but that will have to wait for a day when we have more time.

Fun stuff:

A lot of the institutions using the app would like some kind of statistical reporting. It’s something we’ve never had a chance to do and not something we will be able to accommodate any time soon. We did decide to implement a fun little “Most Popular” tab, so you can see which 50 works are the most popular at any given time. While it’s a far cry from the stats everyone would like to see, this is fun and all users of ArtShare can benefit from discovering more objects this way.

That’s all folks!

If you are one of the 4,690 people using ArtShare on Facebook, you can see these new changes by enabling the new profile changes and then go to your ArtShare settings to select new work or make changes to how ArtShare is displayed on your profile.

ArtShare, the Brooklyn Museum’s Facebook application just won a Silver award in the Online Presence category of the American Association of Museums MUSE awards. We are in great company with the Powerhouse taking Gold for its online Collection (a project we are great admirers of).

Judges said:
“ArtShare on Facebook is a simple web application with a great, innovative concept: provide a database-driven storehouse of images for users to populate their Facebook pages with and allow users to add their own artwork. In other words, this application creates a new virtual port of entry to museum content (albeit one limited to Facebook users), that taps into the universal desire to “share ownership” of great art. By tapping into mainstream social networking, this application engages new audiences and spurs communal discussion and conversation about artwork and other collections objects. Visually, the application succeeds in retaining the clean and appealing interface of the Facebook site itself, no mean feat in the often-cluttered social networking environment. The Brooklyn Museum’s foresight and generosity in opening this application up to use by its museum peers (ArtShare now includes content from eight different museums ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Powerhouse) preserves the integrity and authority of art and institution alike makes this application an award-winning development. Three cheers for ArtShare’s art-sharing concept, execution, and cross-museum synergy.”

ArtShare now has 2239 users and 12 institutions using the application to share their collections (with more on the way in the coming months). We intend to make some technical changes/additions as soon as Facebook completes their expected profile overhauls.

Side note, if you are at AAM this week, I’m in a session about blogging with some really awesome folks, so come by and check it out.

Update! ArtShare also won in an additional category, the Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award (Cindy, Seb – thanks for the headsup on this).

“The Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award was introduced in New Orleans at the 2004 MUSE awards ceremony. Jim Blackaby, a board member of the Media and Technology Committee, passed away in the summer of 2003. Jim influenced many in the museum world with his innovative work in information services and Internet strategies. Conceived in his memory, this award recognizes a project that exemplifies the power of creative imagination in the use of media and technology a project that has a powerful effect on its audience, and one that stands above the others in inventiveness and quality. The winner is selected from submissions to the MUSE awards of all categories and does not necessarily have to be a winner within the category to which it was submitted.”

Having launched in early November, we now have just over 1000 people using ArtShare on Facebook. I’m happy to say we’ve been joined by five other institutions (IMA, Met, Powerhouse, V&A, Walters) with a few more on the way soon. 174 artists are using ArtShare to share their own works. To date, institutions have uploaded 438 works from their collections and artists have uploaded 754.

Those are some of the straight stats, but it probably doesn’t tell the whole story. On Facebook, the highest traffic comes from browsing profiles, so exposure to the images may be significantly higher. For instance, if each ArtShare user has 20 friends, a lot more people could be seeing the images from ArtShare being shuffled on that profile. In a nut shell, 1000 people may have installed it, but a lot more may be seeing it and while this is not the kind of traffic we can measure, it is interesting to think about.

And on that note, one of the things I find most interesting are the works in ArtShare that are most interesting to our users. Here are the top 5 selected works. Keep in mind, these top 5 shift around a lot – this is the top 5 today, not the cumulative over time. Also note, 4 of the 6 institutions are new to ArtShare, so the Brooklyn Museum and V&A collections have received more exposure over time and that’s clearly being reflected here.

We’ve received a lot of great suggestions and have some thoughts of our own to make ArtShare even better. Over time, you should expect to see user interface changes and adjustments that will enable artists using the app to better share their own work. We’d also like to work in a general stats page within the application, so the basic numbers that we’ve reported here are always available to anyone using it. However, these changes must wait until after the Brooklyn Museum’s Spring exhibition cycle when we expect our workload to lighten just a bit. In the mean time, go check out the latest works that have been uploaded – there’s a lot to choose from now!

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!

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.