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!

I should probably take an aside at this point and remind everyone that we’ve not always had great success working with the Wikipedia community.  If you remember Wikipedia Loves Art and managed to get through all the blog posts including the four-part lessons learned, then you know just how complicated and painful that project was.  However, the wiki community is one of the most vibrant on the web and, as a community-minded organization, we needed to regroup and figure out a better way of working with these folks—turning our backs and giving up was not an option.  Let’s look at how this is different.

One of the biggest issues with Wikipedia Loves Art was how much work it created for all involved—countless hours from volunteer photographers, hundreds of staff hours to clean up and caption submissions and even more hours from the wiki community to upload all the assets.  This was a project that simply didn’t scale.  So, in this round, our aim was to keep this a collaborative process with much simpler information management. By cross-posting our assets using a programmable bot, we can get the information to the wiki community in a much more efficient way.  Since the wiki is a living, breathing thing that constantly changes, one of the most important parts of this project is creating a second bot that will monitor the changes the wiki community makes to these records and show us how the records are used.  Once we can get a grasp on these collective changes, we can think about ways to integrate that information back into our collection online—it’s this second bot that creates a two-way exchange and allows us to collaborate more effectively with the wiki community.  In addition, this second bot will also write metadata changes to the wiki, so our data does not get stale.  This is a process that must be carefully choreographed so we don’t overwrite community changes, but we think this delicate dance is one that we can learn an enormous amount from.  All that said, the first bot has been created and is happily uploading assets as I write this. The second bot will follow shortly after we’ve gotten everything posted.

By contrast, posting to the Internet Archive was a much simpler process primarily because it’s a one-way dump—they’ve got a clearly documented API and they have a very open structure to work with.  It’s a bit of a blank slate—you can create your own fields, which means you can apply rights information as needed.  We are posting all of our “no known copyright” images there, as well as all images that we’ve licensed with CC-BY-NC.    Wikipedia will be getting fewer assets because they don’t accept Creative Commons licensing that restricts to non-commercial use and retaining commercial rights is still something that the Museum is interested in maintaining.

Posting to these two communities complements what we’ve been doing at The Commons on Flickr.  Seb has an excellent blog detailing why The Commons on Flickr is fundamentally different in nature and these are all things that we agree with.  Here’s to hoping that bot number two helps to bridge some of that gap.

Our bots are uploading now and will be making progress throughout the next several weeks to finish up the initial upload.  To see the progress, check out: Internet Archive | Wikimedia Commons.

Many thanks are owed to Paul Beaudoin for his great work (bot magic, really!) on this project – thanks, Paul.  For all of their help and coordination, thanks are also owed to Maarten Dammers, Richard Knipel, and Liam Wyatt on the Wikipedia front; Alexis Rossi, George Oates and Yolanda King at the Internet Archive.  Cheers!

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!

Are you a fan of the materials being uploaded to the Flickr Commons?   Well, we are huge fans and that got a few of us wondering about a way to thank the community of people who’ve rallied around our materials by tagging, commenting, investigating and looking.   Paula Bray (Powerhouse) was thinking it was high time to take community favorites, do slideshows on our buildings and have a giant global meetup to celebrate! Sure sounded like a good idea to us, so save the date of October 2nd and 3rd—each institution will be posting more information about their hosted meetup as we get closer.  For our part, we are teaming up with the New York Public Library at Target First Saturday for a joint event—stay tuned.

In order for us to have a slideshow, we need your help.  Ryan Donahue at the George Eastman House created a way you can go and vote for which images you’d like to see during the meetup.   So, you’ve got until September 16th to tell us which of your favs should be in the slideshow.

More news via the Flickr blog or the Powerhouse and keep your eyes on this discussion topic on Flickr where we are making all the announcements.  We can’t wait to see you at the meetup!

Susan A. Hutchinson, Founding Museum Librarian, with William Henry Goodyear, Founding Curator of Fine Arts in the Library Reading Room circa 1910.

Since the images collected by William Henry Goodyear (1846-1923) are generating interest today we thought it would interesting to look back at Goodyear and several of his colleagues who built the Museum’s collections over the years. So let’s declare 2009 the year of looking back and learning from history. Hopefully this exercise will educate us all as we move forward and learn about each other and our cultural heritage. Who knows maybe we will end the year in a more peaceful way than we started.

Let me start with a quote from artist John La Farge to William Henry Goodyear: “You have opened the window that has been closed for centuries, and have let in the light”.

I believe that La Farge was referring to Goodyear’s intense interest in photography as a tool to document the world he saw. A Yale graduate and student at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, Goodyear devoted himself to teaching and lecturing about the history of art and architecture. After graduating from Yale in 1867, he traveled to Germany, Italy, Palestine and Syria to pursue his interest in architecture. It was in Pisa in 1870 that he began to focus on architectural details and later published in an article entitled “A Lost Art” in Scribner’s Magazine, the first of many essays he wrote about architectural refinements. Goodyear started his museum career in 1882 as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in 1899 came to the Brooklyn Museum as the first curatorial appointment made by the newly founded museum. At Brooklyn, Goodyear led a series of research and collecting expeditions with a mission to build an art collection. He oversaw the growth of the American, European and ancient art collections including the casts of Ancient and Renaissance sculpture as well as designing and installing exhibitions of newly acquired art.

Hall of Sculpture with Casts, circa 1904.

In addition to his curatorial mandate, Goodyear dedicated time to developing his architectural theory that historic buildings were planned with irregularities which he referred to as refinements. This study focused on architectural monuments found around the world from the Cathedral of Pisa to the temples of Egypt with stops in Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece and Turkey. Like his colleague Stewart Culin, founding curator of Ethnology from 1903 to 1929, Goodyear seems to have been interested in everything and this is evidenced in his photographs of people and places around the world from a street vendor in Istanbul to the vivid depictions of the world fairs of Chicago and Paris. Goodyear recognized the importance of these fairs as an educational tool to introduce cultures from different parts of the world. He, like Culin, also saw objects at the fairs and recommended their acquisition for Brooklyn. These photographs by Alfred Percival Maudslay were exhibited at the Chicago Columbian Exposition and collected for Brooklyn after Goodyear and Culin saw them at the fair. Indeed, Goodyear worked obsessively using photography as a tool to educate and a method to document his findings in the field in addition to his writings.

Maudslay photographs on view in the Chicago Columbian Exposition, circa 1893.

It seems that throughout his long life he developed theories that explored new themes in the history of art starting with his “Grammar of the Lotus” documenting continuing use of the lotus form in decorative art since its use in Ancient Egypt. He also wrote several popular histories of art and was one of the first to use actual photographs, as opposed to engravings, to illustrate these texts. He took and collected photographs and used them in the form of lantern slides to illustrate his many lectures–over 130 for the Brooklyn Museum alone–ranging from the art of ancient civilizations to the art of the nineteenth century. In addition to being known as an architectural historian, Goodyear was a scholar of anthropology, archaeology and ethnology with a focus on America, Egypt, Greece and Rome. All of this is evidenced in the photographs (lantern slides, negatives and prints) and his research (published and unpublished) found in the Museum Libraries and Archives.

His photographs offer detailed images of historic structures before the devastation of world wars and rampant twentieth century architectural “redevelopment.” His documentation of many buildings has served as guideposts to reconstruction of several monuments that have been destroyed or renovated over the years. But his influence went beyond architecture since it was his vision that laid the groundwork for two major art museum collections–the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was responsible for recommending the acquisition of several important objects including the antiquities collection and library assembled by Charles Edwin Wilbour, America’s first Egyptologist. Goodyear also established the first children’s museum in America – the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Today we all benefit from Goodyear’s scholarship and foresight as we see the world before us through his photographs and writings.

More to come about these early visionaries in Brooklyn, but today we are honoring Professor Goodyear by releasing more images from his archives of street scenes and mosques in Turkey in response to comments on Flickr Commons.

You may have read about the departure of George Oates in the media, but if not check out Seb’s blog post on the subject for starters. The thing that I worried about most with George’s absence was the idea that our cheerleader—the person who had a very personal connection to each Commons Institution, the one who spread her enthusiasm for our collections to the Flickr crowd—was suddenly gone and how does a gaping hole like that get filled? Well, I learned something very valuable. When community is strong, shifts can take place that fill the gap and in this instance, that’s exactly what happened.

To my relief, a few days after we found out about George, I came in to work one morning to a message in the Brooklyn Museum’s Flickr inbox. I won’t quote the whole thing here, but BigBean sent a lovely note asking us to join a group – “I was very surprised to find that there was not one single flickr group devoted to the Commons! In true flickr tradition, I decided to start one. On flickr, groups is where it’s at!”

Boom! In the simplest way, using Flickr’s existing structure, suddenly we have a fantastic group run by some really committed admins and the participation that is going on there is as rich as it gets and it’s only been two days. This new group provides a direct link to the people within the Flickr community who really love The Commons and this was something we had been missing. Previously, we could make one-on-one connections, but the group allows for much greater interaction among all participants.

As most of you know, we’ve got a set of challenges we have to think about as we move forward in The Commons and, now, the feedback from this group will help us greatly. To say we are looking forward to following and participating in this group is, well, a bit of an understatement.

Looking for something fun? How about this thread where Brenda Anderson is curating mail delivery across Commons collections? Awesome.

The Commons can help smaller institutions by eliminating the coding barrier. Flickr already has ways to upload and change data in batch and there’s a strong community of developers coding Grease Monkey scripts to help add functionality where Flickr stops—thank you Flickr, for a rockin’ API. While some members of The Commons created their own batch upload tools to draw directly from their internal systems, Brooklyn just used existing tools (Flickr’s Uploadr and Organizr paired with Steev’s GM scripts) and this worked well for us without the need of another big project, but it didn’t eliminate issues of workload—it just transferred them to another area.

As I mentioned in my last post, what was once a small town turned into a big, booming metropolis when we joined The Commons. Previously there had been a lot of discussion going on about the current happenings of the institution and those discussions were quick, easy and (most of all) fun exchanges. We could get back to people within 24 hours and really engage in a personal way—it was clear to everyone (we hope) that someone was home—that we were there to put a personal face on the institution and we took that very seriously.

We find the exchanges at The Commons are fundamentally different than what we had been experiencing and they tend to be more time consuming for us. This is high-traffic, so we exponentially increased exposure to all the materials on our account by a lot more than what we had been used to. Each time a new institution joins The Commons, the publicity from it drives more traffic our way. This issue doesn’t really go away—it just becomes an even greater challenge to manage our time. You might be asking at this point, don’t we all want higher traffic for our materials? What could possibly be the problem here and why could it possibly outweigh the benefit of more exposure?

True enough, we’ve seen a lot of fantastic things happen with the material because of this exposure, but we’ve also been grappling with the staff time it takes to respond to people in a meaningful way. For one, often people just tell us how much they really like something we’ve uploaded, and while that’s really nice, it creates a lot of filtering through those responses to ensure we don’t miss the questions people may have or the contributions they have to offer. For instance, I once missed a major contribution for way too long just because it got buried (ummm, yikes).

Also, it’s been more difficult to get to know this group of people on a personal level. This rolls round to the big, bustling city again. In the small town, we thrilled to see responses like the above because we knew (or were getting to know) the people who were leaving the comments. Now, it’s a bit overwhelming and I often feel as if we can’t engage the way we used to (there have been some exceptions here, but this is my general feeling).

Sometimes we see that visitors to The Commons will ask questions casually (example above) as a way of engaging, but it can provide us with a difficult task—meaningful responses take a decent amount of research and time.

When we get contributions that can lead us in the right direction and fill in a missing piece of the puzzle, we want to verify that before changing our own records and this verification process takes time. It’s pretty fantastic that we are getting this kind of response, but the verification takes enough time that I often feel it gives the impression there is a void of interaction on our account because we don’t respond as quickly as we’d like. The kind of response time shown above is an eternity on the www, but a reality for us given the amount of resources we have (read on…).

As we take this break to examine the cause and effect of all of this, we have to consider just how strapped we are for staff time. To give you an idea, we have one Archivist (Angie) who’s been working with a volunteer researcher (Ed, you are awesome) in order to maintain the account. I help by going through the incoming responses and manage things by sending things to Angie and Ed that need a response or those really whiz-bang cool things they will want to know about. Given that this needs to be less than 1/10 of what we do on a normal basis, keeping up can be a bit stressful for all of us. It’s ironic that smaller institutions can now take advantage of a system like this since it may create other problems when there are fewer people to share the workload (or, at least, this has been a challenge for us).

What’s interesting for me personally is that this equation—our presence on social networks, our e-comment books, the Posse, this blog, etc.—had never, ever presented a problem. It was always a very doable amount of time and always, always, always a very personal engagement, but the higher traffic at The Commons has somewhat tipped the balance in this one instance and it makes it an interesting case study.

The great news is the assets are being seen by a broader audience (another primary part of our mission), we are gaining a better understanding of how people are using our materials (something we really need to know) and we’ve seen a lot engagement (which can be really awesome), but in trying to maintain our own ideals in how we approach community on the web, we are cautious moving forward. In thinking about how to resume our uploads to The Commons, I have a feeling you’ll see fewer uploads overall at a much slower pace so we can keep up.

If you’ve made it this far…fun news is coming at the end of the week, so hope to see you then!

When we established an account on Flickr back in 2006 (was it that long ago?), the idea was simple: reach out to make personal connections with our visitors and extend the visit. Our first uploads were centered around our Graffiti exhibition—document an interactive in the gallery, so visitors could see their contribution, share with others and discover how the interactive changed over time. What we found was an incredibly rich community of users who wanted to engage with us and after Graffiti we continued sharing the daily life of the institution in various ways often uploading photos of gee-whiz-behind-the-scenes. For the most part, it was kind of a small town over there – even with 1500 contacts, I could pretty definitively say I knew many of them and easily kept up with the goings-on at their feeds. Though we’d hear from people in all parts of the world, for the most part, this was a local community with many of our most active contributors living right down the street or very close by and visiting often.

Now, jump to two years later. Flickr created The Commons and joining to share our archival material seemed really natural to us, but we were firm—we didn’t want to open a separate account for these photographs. We felt (and still do today) that the content shouldn’t be split. Given the exposure Flickr gives to The Commons, it seemed as if the creation of a second Commons-only account would send the wrong message to our current Flickr community—as if this material was somehow more important than everything else and we just didn’t think that was fair to either the community or the materials to separate it. Flickr understood where we were going with this and graciously created what is now known as the “blended” account, where we could continue uploading daily life and add Commons material to the mix.

Initially, we were worried there would be confusion—would people mistake one type of content for another in a blended account? On the contrary, we’ve found most people are pretty clear on the differences and this has confirmed our general feeling that Flickr is a great place to be where people really take-in and process what is going on. That said, we’ve had some unexpected issues crop up and we wonder if it may be as a result of the type of materials we initially decided to upload to The Commons.

Paris Exposition: night view, Paris, France, 1900. Night view includes the Ponte Alexandre III. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection (S03_06_01_015 image 2012).

The idea was to use materials we already had on hand and, since Flickr is a global community, begin by uploading materials that were of general interest. We began by uploading shots of expositions in Paris and Chicago and images of Egypt. Two things may have happened as a result of this strategy. First, we quickly found was our small town turned into a big, booming metropolis (something I’m going to talk more about in the next post). Second, it seems as if the people engaging with The Commons materials may have different motivation than our original, more local audience. The Commons audience cares deeply about the material we uploaded, but perhaps are not as invested in who houses it. In turn, we’ve noticed that our original Flickr audience doesn’t seem to respond much to The Commons material we upload (they seem more invested in place and, therefore, the daily-life-of-the-institution photos we still publish). In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense and, as a result, the types of interaction that are happening on the account are just not as balanced as we’d like.

Irving Underhill, American, 1872-1960. Luna Park and Surf Avenue, Coney Island, 1912. Archival inkjet print. Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection. mp1-1996.164.8-B19045.

If we had to do it all over again, we would not change our position regarding the need for the blended account, but I think we might have re-considered what those first Commons uploads would have been. We have a series of glass negatives that depict scenes of old Brooklyn and, looking back, I think this material might have split the difference and engaged both audiences a bit better. I’m leaning in this direction because we have seen some crossover with our Egyptian materials and this makes a lot of sense given that the museum is known for its Egyptian collection—this is content that speaks to both the Commons audience and our local visitors. Then, perhaps, slowly branching out into Paris and Chicago might have brought everyone together as we all grew.

As we pause to consider our next steps, it leaves Deirdre, Angie and me thinking about what kinds of materials to upload in the next round in the hopes that we can create a more delicate balance between these two worlds.

In the next post, I’ll be discussing challenges with the workload.

World’s Columbian Exposition: Ferris Wheel, Chicago, United States, 1893. View of Ferris Wheel, [which dwarfs surrounding buildings,] Sept.; Starks W. Lewis, Amateur, Brooklyn, N.Y. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection (S03_06_01_016 image 2194).

One day, we came in to a fantastic surprise: Brian Karpuck re-used materials on his blog to create a walking tour of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This is exactly what we were hoping for—mash-ups that would highlight the materials at hand and show them off in creative ways. Check out his posts and the panorama he created (thanks, Brian!):

Touring the Chicago World’s Fair: The Court of Honor in Pictures
More Pictures From the White City
The Original Ferris Wheel in Pictures
Chicago’s World’s Fair: The Remains of the Day

When people ask me how things are going for us with The Commons, I immediately think of friends on Facebook who’ve listed their relationship status as “it’s complicated.” Even with really, really great stuff going on like Brian’s effort to further define our Chicago resources, we’ve had confusion and frustration of our own making. As it turns out, the rights statement we were using on The Commons wasn’t clear enough. Our institutional policy is to release as much material possible, but we do reserve the rights for commercial use because the money that is made from those uses helps us take care of the collections we own. We realized that our own statement on Flickr was generating confusion because it didn’t state these expectations one way or another.

Like everything we jump into, we change and adjust as needed. In this instance, we’ve clarified our rights statement and wait to see if this change eliminates confusion. In the meantime, we are holding off uploading anything else until we can see if this resolves some of the issues we’ve been facing. We are hopeful these changes will help and the 2000+ images I’ve got cloaked on our Flickr feed can be released soon.

There have been other complications. We started to see our images in The Commons migrating to Wikimedia Commons. Check out discussions here and here. Initially a template was created that would mirror the rights statements, but that template is now slated for deletion—take a look at this discussion. We ended up resolving the issue by working with an editor at Wikimedia directly and after this help, good news, all of the Brooklyn Museum Commons images that were uploaded to Wikimedia link back to our now-clarified rights statement (example) which puts us more at ease. Working with the wiki editors has been a really positive experience and it leaves me thinking about ways we can do a better job of working with this community, so stay tuned!

We’ve had some other Commons-related issues going on as well (all of our own making, which easily fall under the “be careful what you wish for” category), but this is already a long post, so e-mail me if you want more info on those.