Over the years, it has become clear that the key readership of this blog has been from the technology community—those colleagues and students following our tech efforts at the Museum.  We’ve tried for broader content here, but we’ve never been able to do that consistently and it’s never (at least statistically speaking) landed well.  Starting today, this blog will focus on tech and continue to do so.  The former content is still here if you are looking to surface it, but the focus from here on will be on technology.

So, where is all that great curatorial, conservation, and archival content going?  In the past few months, we’ve been testing Tumblr and it’s been a much better channel for this type of content.  Statistically, we can see that this very visually rich content has a much broader reach here and our Tumblr will focus on these areas.  Interestingly, we found the tech content which does so well here fell totally flat there, so splitting content to platform in this manner makes sense.

Material at The Commons on Flickr has been moved to Wikimedia and seeded into appropriate articles, such as the Paris Exposition of 1900.

As of today, we have left Flickr (including The Commons).  We’ve seen a steady decline in the engagement level at Flickr and it was clear it was time to leave the platform, though we still love it.  For those of you who gasped, fear not!  We’ve moved all of The Commons material to Wikimedia Commons and images are now being seeded to appropriate articles (take a look at the Paris Expo 1900 to see this beautifully in action).  This move will continue to give those assets much-needed visibility while allowing us to focus engagement efforts elsewhere.  Additionally, it allows us to continue to focus our efforts at Wikipedia, which is working well and continues as a highly visible platform.

As part of this same thinking, we have also left History Pin; another platform we love, but wasn’t working for our goals and was splitting our attention.  As for day-to-day image sharing of exhibition load-ins, it won’t surprise you to hear that will continue at Instagram where we are seeing a high level of engagement.

We have left iTunesU in favor of sharing content via YouTube and SoundCloud.  We just were not seeing the statistics to continue with iTunesU.  We found the administration of the account laborious and the statistical reporting onerous.  It was clear to us from an administrative standpoint, it was a drain on staff time that simply wasn’t giving back enough as a distribution channel.

Additional cleanup that may surprise you?  We’ve deleted our Foursquare branded page because it wasn’t working well from a community engagement standpoint; it was confusing to have the branded page (that most people didn’t know about) sitting alongside the venue page, which is created and maintained by site users.  Over the years, we’ve come to learn there are some places where our own presence is not needed and the community functions beautifully on its own.  Foursquare is one of those (and our feelings are similar about Pinterest).

If there’s one thing I’d love to do that would be to …..leave Facebook.  Interaction on this platform has plummeted and while we don’t feel like we can leave just yet, we are spending our energies elsewhere in places where we are seeing deeper engagement.

As platforms and our goals continue to morph, you’ll see us make even more changes.  In the meantime, we hope you’ll continue to read our newly-branded tech blog because we’ve got some exciting projects coming up.

In years past, we’ve shared various aspects of this event via social media mostly in the form of documentation; artists creating tables, guests arriving, and activity happening throughout the night.  This year, we decided to go a more creative route and our Twitter and Instagram feeds will become #table17.

Starting Friday, Brooklyn-based artist Man Bartlett will take over these two feeds and create a project that speaks to how everyone can bring something to the table.  In his own words:

The People’s Table is a virtual collection of images submitted by people around the world in response to the question, “What do you bring to the table?” It is meant to act as a reminder of the multitude of ways that people attribute value to objects and ideas in culture, while simultaneously offering access without regard to significant financial or societal limitations. Anyone with access to an Internet connection can bring themselves, and their vision to the table. Additionally, this collection will be projected for the guests of the 2013 BK Ball, where they will be invited to participate as well.

Man is working with Barry Hoggard to help bring the table to life and we couldn’t be more excited to see it materialize both online and in the building on April 24.  Follow @brooklynmuseum on Twitter and Instagram to join us at #table17.

For the new shop design, the architects took a typical box-shaped space and made it come alive with an organic curved ceiling that moves gently around the room from front to back. The curve is echoed on the floor with an arched jewelry counter and display tables, allowing you to meander around the shop with ease. Featured as part of the lighting design, there are two stunning, sculptural chandeliers created by Brooklyn designer, David Weeks.

With our expanded shop, we are featuring a special section dedicated to Brooklyn-designed products and we are highlighting a selection of the borough’s emerging and established designers, artisans, jewelers, authors and illustrators. We’ll also be highlighting collection-based products and have been particularly inspired by the Museum’s expansive Decorative Arts collection that has recently acquisitioned objects by Brooklyn designers, Jason Miller, Harry Allen and Paul Loebach. Among the pieces on display you will find nature inspired dinnerware by Jason Miller, the Chrome Brush Vase by Harry Allen, and Paul Loebach’s Distortion Candlesticks. In honor of Brooklyn’s bourgeoning culinary ventures and along with the new book Edible Brooklyn, we are offering Brooklyn Salsa, made with locally sourced ingredients as well as Mast Bros. Chocolate bars whose cocoa beans are selected from equatorial global regions.

Everyone on our staff has a favorite product and brought a different style to the evolution of the product selection—making it as diverse, exciting and eclectic as possible. Tracy Boni, our shop’s Associate Information Manager, will be using Pinterest to pin some of our favorites to a pinboard.  Follow us on Pinterest to learn more about new products we are featuring and tell us what you think!

In The Moving Garden, Lee Mingwei asks visitors who take a flower to give it to a stranger.

One of the great things about working with living artists is the chance to work with them when they bring projects into the building. When I first heard about this piece, I was struck by what could happen between strangers in the exchange, so Eugenie and I asked the artist if he would let us create something that would allow visitors to document their gift giving.  He felt that the mystery of giving the gift was central to the piece, but he was also curious about exchanges and thought we could try it as long as we made it clear that the documentation was an optional step in the process, not a requirement to take part.

I gave my flower to a stranger at the corner of Washington Ave and Lincoln Place. It was an experience I'm not likely to forget.

With that, #mygardengift was born.  It’s a simple interactive that we hope extends the life of the project outside our walls.  Visitors are invited to document their exchanges by tagging on Flickr, Twitter and Instagr.am.  In addition, for the first time, we are using SMS text messaging in an interactive.  Visitors can text us about the exchange and we use the Twilio API to map their responses and bring them into the interactive. There’s a page on the website that shows all the responses and we also use an iPad to display the exchanges in the gallery.

This is really the kind of project that we want to be using social media for—working directly with an artist to show a community’s experience around a work. Given the four platforms that we are using, I’m curious to see which ones get used the most and how the information coming to us may differ on each.  Mostly, though, I’m excited to see our community participate and to watch the mystery unfold in some of the exchanges and I can’t wait to talk to the artist to see his own response to this part of the project as it grows.

If you come to Lee Mingwei: “The Moving Garden”, take a flower and then use #mygardengift to document your exchange.

Many of you may remember ArtShare, the Brooklyn Museum’s Facebook application. ArtShare had good intentions and was an effort to be inclusive to many different types of users: institutions could use it to share works in their collection on Facebook profiles and pages; artists could upload and share their own work; and art lovers could install the app and customize their profiles with the works they liked the most.  The app worked pretty well during early days, but we quickly found that Facebook’s changes often came without much warning and every time Facebook would change their API, we’d have to drop everything to fix the app.  API changes were one thing, but Facebook soon started changing profile layouts and with those shifts in design we saw the Facebook community moving away from app usage.  It has become clear that keeping up with Facebook’s shifting priorities is too difficult with our limited staffing and with fewer people using the application we are pulling the plug.

I wish we could easily pull the plug on more than just ArtShare, but Facebook does not make things easy.  We’ve got a legacy Brooklyn Museum group—a holdover from the days before pages—that should ideally be deleted, but guess what?  In order to delete a Facebook group, you have to delete every member from the group before the group can be deleted.  Did you catch that?? There are more than a thousand people in this group and deleting them all before we can retire the group is simply not a practical use of time. Until Facebook has a better solution for deletion, we’ve had to resort to changing the group to a hidden status and posting a note to redirect current members to the Museum’s Facebook page.  This is a heck of a messy way to deal with a problem that should have an easy fix.

After five years, we are finally pulling the plug on the Myspace profile.  We’ve muddled over this one for quite some time and most people will wonder why we bothered to keep this at all because “everyone has moved to Facebook,”  but things are more nuanced than that. As a community-minded organization we are very conscious of the work Danah Boyd has done on Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and Myspace. While this article was written in 2007, many of the issues it brings up are still true today and given the diversity of our audience and a mission that holds accessibility paramount, cutting and running from Myspace never seemed like a sound idea.  Because we had started to see less usage, we got a little closer to shutting down the profile last year, but ended up needing a more active presence there when Myspace Music became a sponsor for Who Shot Rock—that was enough to stop deletion in its tracks. At this point, however, it’s become more difficult to maintain the profile—we are so inundated with spam on the site that sorting through what might be legit posts is too arduous.  With lower usage overall combined with higher difficulty to manage the platform, it is now time to go.

Generally, you’ll see us continue to jump into social platforms as we see our audience gathering there.  We feel it’s important to have a presence where people are knowing they may not come directly to www.brooklynmuseum.org, but as with any technology we will watch the landscape and adjust as we go along.  As audience moves from one platform to another or as platforms modify beyond recognition, we’ll change with them and that can mean making difficult and carefully studied decisions about when to stay and when to go.