So, what do we do with all these snippets of conversation? Once a snippet is tagged with an object’s accession number we use it in a number of ways internally. For starters, the snippet becomes available to the team in the dashboard ensuring the team has previous conversations at their fingertips when someone else is asking questions about the same object. Additionally, snippets are exported into Google Docs on a quarterly basis and sent to curatorial for a review. Curators review all the snippets for their collections and exhibitions, meet with the ASK team to discuss the content, and then certain snippets—those that contain the most accurate answers and are most on point with curatorial vision—are marked “curator vetted.”

These post-processing steps ensure that we can quantify how many questions have been asked and, more importantly, what questions are being asked about our objects and exhibitions. This process sees that there’s ongoing communication between the ASK team and our curatorial staff; something we’ve found critical in this project. It gives curatorial the chance to learn from the conversations taking place in our galleries every day.

ASK snippets can now be seen on object pages like in this example of our Spacelander Bicycle.

But, that’s not all. Once a snippet is marked “curator vetted,” it becomes available for various uses. Internally, we’ve developed a portal where staff can search for snippets related to objects and exhibitions. Externally, these snippets have now been integrated into the website and you’ll find them in two areas. In our collection online, you’ll see snippets related to specific objects—check out Spacelander Bicycle, Peaceable Kingdom, or Avarice for examples. Additionally, our special exhibitions now have a dedicated page of snippets related to that exhibition; you can see examples on Steve Powers, This Place, and Agitprop pages.

The beauty of this is now everyone can start to see the website immersed in the activity that’s been happening through the app and there’s a certain life that this user generated content brings to our own material. There are, of course, a myriad of ways conversational content can help shape our online presence. This is a just a start to something we hope to see grow more robust over time.

As with building any infrastructure, a disaster plan should also be in place to make sure people know what’s happening when something goes wrong. Part of the alphabet soup of Amazon Web Services, Route53, is configured with the ability to automatically route web visitors away from a server having—or about to have—issues to a static placeholder page hosted in an S3 bucket based in Oregon, independent of website assets or server-side code. This is called a DNS Failover. The switch is triggered by an AWS health check which we’ve set up on our production server to check for whether a web or database server is unavailable. If that’s the case, the health check, a simple PHP page that only returns an HTTP header response, returns an HTTP 503 error, otherwise it returns an HTTP 200 OK response. The end result is a “fail whale” page that shows up when the site is going down or already there.

Aside from letting site visitors know when things are amiss, the same AWS health check triggers an email notification to our developer team, which is then picked up by their smartphones (or, in my case, a Nokia 515 which happens to have Exchange support). At the office, we’ve created a glowing 3D printed status indicator based on the 3D scan of Emma-o, King and Judge of Hell aka Yamma aka 閻魔 who we scanned for a 3D printed chess project some time ago.

Emma-Ohnoes, King and Judge of Cloud Computing uses an Arduino Yún and Temboo to connect to the same health check page that Route 53 uses. Like the DNS failover setup, it connects to the health check page every minute, however, if a 200 OK is detected, it glows blue, otherwise it pulses red using one of the Arduino’s analog inputs with pulse width modulation (PWM).

Our health check page is pretty specifically catered to just our systems, but Amazon has put together a neat guide on how to create one for your own architecture. The Arduino sketch and schematic and 3D files for Emma Ohnoes, however, can easily be adapted to any website by changing the targetUrl to either your own health check page or the website URL directly to see if it’s up or not.

Download Emma-Ohnoes’s Arduino sketch and schematics (MIT license) on Github

Download Emma Ohnoes’s 3D models (CC-BY-3.0) on Thingiverse

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.

Speaking of poetry, a couple of months ago I started to notice poems began appearing in our collection online.  Now we’ve seen a lot of benefits to allowing comments in our collection—everything from causal comments and questions to helpful data correction of our records, but the poetry that begain appearing was a whole new use of the collection online and a nice surprise.

Charles-François Daubigny (French, 1817-1878). Moonrise, 1877. Oil on panel, 15 7/8 x 26 3/4 in. (40.3 x 67.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, 13.59. Poem by Raj Arumugam.

The great thing about enabling visitors to sign up for public profiles, means we all get to virtually meet the contributors. In this case, I quickly learned that Raj Arumugam was the writer behind these works and from his profile, I learned a bit about him: “A poet and writer. I write poems after some contemplation of selected images in the public domain and I post them online for the public to read and to view free.”  He’s also a published author and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to publish a Q&A with him given it’s National Poetry Month.

How did you come across our collection online?

I am excited by how the internet can bring on to our screens almost any aspect of our world inheritance of culture. Before the internet, I used to have to rely on public libraries for information on artists – but now, all one has to do is to google and one has in view the works of almost any major artist or art.

I like to link art and my poetry, and searching for some Japanese art the google results produced the name of Brooklyn Museum – and I was immediately attracted to how you present your collection of the 100 One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The site allows ease of navigation between notes and the images.

After that, I’ve been hooked to your site especially because it has such an international and universal approach.

Indian. Cupid Disturbs Krishna's Penance, Page from a Gita Govinda Series, ca. 1650-1660. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, sheet: 7 5/8 x 9 3/4 in. (19.4 x 24.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Poster, 1990.186. Poem by Raj Arumugam.

Your profile bio mentions that you select images in the public domain and post poems online for the public to read and view and for free. What motivates you and what other sites have you found for inspiration?

Well, I love poetry. And I love to write. And I love to write at sites that make it easy for me write a poem and post an accompanying picture. I think with the coming of the internet, poets and artists have to bring in the arts together and I love bringing our world art and my poetry together. For example, I might take a work by Rembrandt (for example, his Rembrandt laughing) and actually ‘meditate’ on the work till the words come to me and then all I have to do is to post it at a site like say, sulekha.com.

I am now doing a similar thing at the Brooklyn Museum site.

Another art site that I have found brilliant is China the Beautiful which carries truly beautiful paintings.

Do you have a process for selecting the images in our collection? Are you drawn to specific collections or works?

I don’t really have a process, but I’m currently in love with Asian art, particularly Chinese, Korean and Japanese art. So I usually go to your collection of Asian art first when at your site.

Asian Art has a different view of our relationship with nature and of our place in this world. Western art portrays a sense of our need to dominate over nature whereas Asian nature offers a deep contemplation of nature as it is, as in “Hibiscus and Sparrow” by Katsushika Hokusai.

There’s a long history of association between poetry and visual art – where do you see your work fitting into this?

With the internet, poetry and art should move into enriching this relationship. The internet and cyberspace indeed offers tremendous opportunity to the poet now – one can do static combinations as in having a poem and art from a master posted as a blog. That’s what I’m doing currently. I hope to move into other possibilities of this arts-poetry-music combination in cyberspace – short videos/films, audio recordings, etc…

Poetry and art are a form meditation (they are of course many other things too) and I find this bringing together my way of meditation.

This bringing together, for me, is what brings calm, insight and stillness.

Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760-1849). A View of Mount Fuji across Lake Suwa, Lake Suwa in Shinano Province (Shinsu Suwako), from the series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei), ca. 1831. Woodblock color print, Image: 10 1/4 x 15 1/16 in. (26 x 38.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Frederic B. Pratt, 42.79. Poem by Raj Arumugam.

Raj has created 43 poems to date and you can read them all on the comments tab of his Posse profile.

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!

Our native site, above left, renders fairly well on the small screen, but we wanted to slim our presence down to the bare minimum for the mobile version, right. We selected areas with the most traffic—exhibitions, calendar, visit information, Target First Saturday—and made templates that re-render the existing information for mobile.

At the most basic level, this is about ease of use for the visitor with the mobile device, but we had other motivations as well.  By launching a mobile site, we can automatically detect and redirect when we see incoming traffic via mobile browsers. This means we can put BklynMuse in the menu of selections and make it more visible and easily found.  Without this lovely candy shell, redirecting to BklynMuse on its own would have been confusing.

You’ll notice we are color-coding the menu of choices to indicate different types of usage.  Dark gray for informational content, cyan for interactive content and dark sage as the catch-all for things that don’t fit in the other categories.  Thanks for this idea, Jenny!

The mobile site also allows us to grow and expand easily and I hope you’ll join me back here for some news on that front tomorrow.

With the launch of the collection online in July 2008, we began with a policy to release only records that had been properly vetted.  The curatorial staff felt that the data released needed to be both accurate and best reflective of the various collections, so in our original spec we created a multi-layered approval process to publish an object.  The vetting process would start in curatorial, allowing them to vet certain parts or an entire record, then the final release would come from our collections staff after an additional once over.  Even though the vetting process worked very well, we were finding that it was taking an awfully long time to publish objects to the web.  For instance, in July 2008 we started with 5168 objects, but eighteen months later we had only grown to 12,598.  While that represents a substantial amount of good data going online, behind the scenes we were seeing long queues of objects ready to release, but hung up somewhere along the way for little bits of final approvals.  In the end, keeping up with the demand of approving records was causing us a great deal of work and getting information out the door was problematic, so we’ve changed course.

At this point, records get published by default and information is added or corrected as we go.  While there are still tons of records that are restricted for various reasons, what we are seeing at this point is much more representative of our holdings. Of course, the release of more records means we had to rethink some aspects of the user experience, so I’m going to run through some of these changes now.

Record Completeness Meter:

One of the most important changes is the visual meter that indicates the completeness of the record.  We want to give our users a very visual way to understand where a record may stand in terms of the overall picture of our data.  As you move your pointer over the meter, the ratings are explained in a tool tip.

Release of Study Images:

Given that we have a lot more records going online, one thing we are lacking are photographs for many of them.  Often our curatorial staff will take study shots with point and shoot cameras just to have something on file for reference.  Internally, we find these shots very helpful and figure that our web visitors may feel the same, so many of these images are being to be released with an explanation regarding the quality.

Comments Overhaul:

We’ve had comments enabled on our object records since the beginning and have received an entire range of responses.  One of the things we noticed is many of the same questions pop up over and over again, so we’ve overhauled the comments area to include a FAQ.  We are hoping this will cut down on some of the more routine questions by putting the information right where people are asking for answers.  Here’s a great example showing why we enable comments on collection objects—you just never know what will come by allowing this kind participation, but we hope the added FAQ will provide better communication all-around.

Browsing, Searching, Sorting:

When browsing, quality records are being pushed to the top of the pile.  When searching, we default to showing relevant records, but users can re-sort the results on demand by relevant or complete.

Edison labs, Henry Ford Museum, Detroit.  Via gruntzooki on Flickr.

Creating a labs area of the collection online, gives us a chance to play around with some ideas and look at trends we are starting to see, but allows us to present projects in an informal way for discussion and visitor testing.  Some labs projects will only take us a few days to put together, while others might take a bit longer.  Depending on what we find out and how we see things used, we may integrate some of these projects into the collection’s main layout.

To start labs, we thought we’d explore love—hey, it is February after all!  We’ve been sitting on a bunch of data that shows how people are reacting to certain objects online and in the galleries.  This first project, What is Love?, displays top-ranked objects broken down by the ways in which people are showing their adoration. There’s active love:  online Posse members selecting objects as favorites in our collection during their web session or visitors coming to the museum and using our interactive gallery guide, BklynMuse, to favorite objects they like on view in the gallery. There’s also passive love: stats generated from the Google Analytics API to show additional metrics such as objects that are most viewed, when folks spend the most time on page with an object, or objects that are getting the most link love on the internet. All of these things shown together, can start to put together a picture of loving going on with regard to objects in our collection.

What is Love? Our first labs project—go explore the data and tell us your thoughts!

I guess I shouldn’t find it all that surprising that our nudes and the erotic sculpture in the Egyptian collection are all quite popular via the web, but I was surprised at how much variance there is between the categories and how few objects are loved across metrics. We released a sneak preview of What is Love? to our Facebook page last week, one person noted that there seemed to be high percentage of women depicted.  We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments—notice any correlations between the data here?  Want to see more of this kind of thing in labs?

“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