Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Today we’re launching the next installment in the Brooklyn Museum Collection on the Web—more than 4,000 images from the Libraries and Archives will join the 5700+ works of art and the nearly 10,000 views of past exhibitions that you’ve already been enjoying. Opening up this latest part of the collection to our community is close to my heart—I used to be the archivist here at the Museum before I went over to the “dark side” and started working with virtual stuff instead of the real thing. Hooray! Looking back over the work we’ve done building a DAMS for the Museum, a couple of visuals, a question, and a caveat jump to mind:

“The pipeline opens.”

Back in 2005, when we first started talking about digital imaging, I kept envisioning a giant pipeline pouring out images onto my office floor (at 3AM, of course). OK, we’ve got that under control – everything’s now pouring into the DAMS pretty smoothly – AND images are now flowing out to the Museum’s Collection on the Web pages. More importantly, they do so without anybody throwing a switch, copying image files, or writing captions, which brings me to image #2:

“Plays well together.”

It’s not a cliché to say that everything is interconnected. Our DAMS and Collection on the Web projects couldn’t happen without both human and application interactions. The web of collaboration engages people throughout the Museum to the community beyond, from the start of workflow when an image is requested, to the tagging, mashups, commentary, and glossy publications once it’s out in the world. And it’s not just people: our Luna DAMS talks to TMS (our collections management system) and vice versa; our website applications talk to both as well as to content management data sources. Not to speak of Flickr, MySpace, and beyond.

“What’s ‘The Collection’?”

Like most museums, we have a great deal of great “stuff” that extends beyond the formal collection: collections of documentary photographs; special collections in the libraries and archives; scrapbooks, letters, receipts, photographs, and other documents that came to the Museum along with an accessioned object. Curators, librarians, and archivists can’t resist these materials, which help tell the story of the collection.

How the Museum grew over the years and how we presented and interpreted the objects is part of the story that can be told with materials from the Museum Archives: pictures of the building and its galleries; views of exhibition installations; press releases and other historical documents. We’ve already launched our exhibition images on the Web (a project I worked on with HTML babysteps years ago); today’s release of a cross-section of archives and library materials is just the start of offerings that will let you build connections across the collection.

“You’ve got to love data to do this job.”

Building a DAMS isn’t all about the pictures—if that was the case, we could just throw the images up and say “browse.” You have to be able to find the image you want and, if you’re on the working side of the equation, you’ve got to manage great masses of image files. The data-crunchers in the Digital Lab link every image to basic “metadata,” object data comes from TMS, and our dedicated Web community provide tags, item by item. It’s a lot of steps by a lot of people…more on imaging and data workflow in my next post.

One of the interesting things about The Commons is anyone can do it, which is pretty cool. Often, I think, larger institutions have an advantage over the smaller ones in that they get to put personnel behind coding projects to get their materials out the door. For a smaller institution, the coding barrier can be a difficult one—it makes projects expensive and often not doable. Here at Brooklyn, we fall somewhere in between—we are lucky to have a talented team of developers on staff, but it’s never enough for all the projects we’d like to do or to keep up with the demands of our existing infrastructure. As readers of this blog (or if you’ve ever seen me speak at conferences) already know, we will often try and find a Scrappy-Doo solution to get us through, which allows us to experiment before committing resources to major project or, sometimes, the scrappy solution enables us to do a project that we could otherwise never commit staff time to.

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. (more…)

This is part two in what I think will eventually be a three part series (sorry, Tyler, I realize you are the king of the three part-er, but this requires some room). In the last post on the subject, I was exploring some of the confusion generated from our rights statement. For this post, I’ll be discussing how differences in content can shift the balance in unexpected ways. (more…)

If you’re one of the few people who still read, you might occasionally reach for a bookmark. The Bureau for Open Culture at Columbus College of Art & Design has issued a set of bookmarks featuring librarians. Portraits on the front, stats on the back, like a baseball card. We are very proud that our own Deirdre Lawrence is one of the bookmarked librarians (portrait by Brooklyn-based artist, Katie Tuss).

If you’re in Columbus, Ohio, you might be able to get some of the Reference Collection bookmarks at participating libraries and independent bookstores (supplies are limited). Everyone else, check out the gallery of 42 bookmarks here.

This week there is a contemporary artists’ book conference being held in collaboration with Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair. The conference is being co-organized by representatives from the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA and the New York Public Library as well as several other institutions who are involved with artists’ books. The conference features a panel session, entitled Artists’ Books from the Brooklyn Perspective, which includes Brooklyn-based artists and publishers Emily Larned of Red Charming, Dan Nadel of PictureBox, and Matvei Yankelevich of Ugly Duckling Presse.

In conjunction with this event, we have just installed several artists’ books from our collection in two display cases in and outside the Library on the second floor, so come visit the Brooklyn Museum and see these interesting books! One strength of our collection is books by Brooklyn-based artists and publishers. I’ve done some blogging on the subject in the past and this time around Lilli Schestag, our great Pratt intern, has compiled lists of Brooklyn-based book artists, galleries and presses for your reference. If you are a Brooklyn based book artist, gallery or press, let us know if you want your name added to any of these lists for future publication. Just send us an e-mail.

We would love to hear your thoughts and comments!

What we do know about Ida Jackson can be found in an intriguing and beautiful diary found in the Brooklyn Museum Library’s Special Collections. The book came into the Museum’s collection in 1945 from Lawrence B. Romaine, who wrote an accompanying text about Ida Jackson. The book offers a view into an American woman’s life from 1858 to 1917 as well as insight into what women wore during that time period.

Beyond handwritten inscriptions you would normally expect to find in a diary, Ida Jackson’s Diary contains: photographs of herself, her family and friends as well as her homes and church, programs from musical soirées and postcards. The diary also includes clippings from 19th century fashion magazines showing images of a variety of dresses, skirts, shirts and entire outfits.

But what I feel is most compelling about this book are the remarkably well-preserved fabric swatches and trimming samples Ida cut from her own clothing throughout her life and carefully glued onto the page. Having been enclosed in the pages of this book for all of these years the fabric and trimming samples have been protected from the harmful fading effects of light exposure so these swatches and samples seem as vivid as the day they were worn. One really should see the book in person to appreciate the tactile quality of the swatches and to experience the charm of the entire document. You can visit the us to see the original document by sending an e-mail.

The first page of the diary, which Ida assembled in retrospect, is dated 1858 when she was 3 years old. The book continues to tell her story up to the final entry in 1917 when she was 62, she died in 1927. The inscriptions which are found throughout the book reveal a number of clues which intertwine personal memories with fashion history.

Clues about the dresses history:
“Formerly mamma’s first dress papa brought for her after their marriage.”

Clues about the use of the outfit:
“Cycling and rainy day dress, trimmed with black and braid panel.”

Clues about popular fashions at the time:
“Wore above draped over black mohair skirt when overskirts began to come into fashion.”

Facsimile pages from Ida Jackson’s Dress Diary will be on view at Proteus Gowanus in their MEND exhibition which opens tomorrow.

If you have been following the numerous blogs on this website you are aware that the Brooklyn Museum has organized an exhibition of Egyptian objects entitled To Live Forever which is now on tour. Among the objects in the show is a very special treasure from the Wilbour Library of Egyptology, a volume from the series entitled the “Description de l’Egypte”. Published in the early 19th century, these volumes are the product of Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition to Egypt (1798-1801). The purpose of this monumental work, published between 1809 and 1822, was to describe and illustrate antiquities, plants, animals and contemporary life found in Egypt and the resulting volumes are an exquisite snapshot of life in Egypt in the nineteenth century. Here are two images from volume 2 of the folios focused on antiquities which illustrate specific objects as well as sites:

Thebes, Hypogees plate 56

Thebes, Qournah plate 43

It is fitting that a volume of the “Description” is part of an exhibition that reflects the eternal aspect of Egyptian life and certainly the ongoing interest in Egyptology. Throughout the text Egypt is repeatedly described as the birthplace of art and science. In the eyes of the French, successive periods of foreign domination had robbed Egyptian society of its former glory. Napoleon feared that soon nothing would be left and the “Description” was seen as a way of preserving, at least on paper, what could be found in Egypt when he and his troops were there. Although some monuments so beautifully described in the “Description” have not survived, many more have been preserved and restored no small part due to the interest in Egypt generated by the “Description” and similar publications that followed it.

Wikipedia has a good account of the “Description de l’Egypte” or the entire contents may be found here.

Like people, books have histories. Bookplates, inscriptions and marginal notes all tell us something about where the book has been and who owned it. The Brooklyn Museum’s Wilbour Library of Egyptology recently received a gift from the Museum’s Director of an 1885 Karl Baedecker’s guide to Egypt that contained a letter, a postcard and a business card and a very interesting story.

The letter, dated 1926, was written by Hammad Hassab, a dragoman (guide) employed by Thomas Cook & Sons in Cairo. The letter urged a former client to consider a return visit to Egypt. As an inducement, a post card of one of Cook’s new Nile steamers was included (pictured above). Otherwise, the letter was quite ordinary, but Mr. Hassab’s business card (pictured below) wasn’t. Most of the space on the card identifies Mr. Hassab as a survivor of the Titanic.

Luckily, Titanic Passenger lists are readily available on line and Mr. Hassab is listed among the First Class passengers. At the time, he was a servant employed by Henry Sleeper Harper and his wife, Abigail. Mr. Hassab was said to be a very handsome but mysterious man and a subject of some interest to other passengers. On the night of the disaster, he, the Harpers and their dog were safely evacuated in Lifeboat 3. The following morning, Mr. Hassab sent a Marconigram (a marconigram was an early version of a radio telegram) to his brother Said at the Mena House Hotel. It contained the terse message, “All safe.” More information about Mr. Hassib can be found here.

Almost immediately after the sinking, a legend developed that the Titanic was carrying a ‘cursed mummy’. The story is just a story but Mr. Hassab’s provides a genuine Egyptian connection to the Titanic. If it’s true that ninety per cent of the value of an object lies in the story behind it, Mr. Hassab’s business card is a valuable object, indeed.

One of the delights in preserving the Libraries and Archives collections at the Brooklyn Museum is that I am so often pleasantly surprised at what I find in a book or a box. A while back I opened two boxes from the collection of the Library’s special collections simply marked, “Bookplates”. It was a collection of miscellaneous bookplates dating from the 1770’s to the 1940’s. These bookplates are created in a variety of media including etchings, engravings, linoleum blocks and woodcuts. This collection was donated to the Museum over the years when the Print Department was actively collecting and exhibiting examples of printing. Unfortunately, most of the bookplates in this collection are not signed by the artist, but can only be identified by the owner of the bookplate. Here are the highlights:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Since I have had bookplates on the brain, I recently came across this wonderful blog dedicated to bookplates and I most certainly bookmarked it. It’s funny how a few ‘book’ terms like bookmark and web page have made it into our everyday computer lexicon. One wonders what will happen to terms like dog-eared, deckle edge and a personal favorite, double elephant folio (that’s a book up to 50 inches or 4 feet!) in the digital future. As one also wonders what will come of the art of the bookplate. Here’s a website of the American Society of Bookplate Collectors & Designers. Finally, here is a site with a glossary of book terms.

I spent a day last week in an auditorium at the Brooklyn College Library surrounded by librarians donning “Hello My Name is” tags and mulling over topics ranging from Facebook to the NSA. It started out on a good note, I was happy owing to the absolutely perfect warm/grey/water-y-without-being-rainy weather. And I didn’t get at all lost. Until I got a little lost and almost went into a nearby high school. This clearly would have been a catastrophic if hackneyed turn of events. What if they didn’t let me leave? I would have to take algebra, I would get hassled by mean girls, no one would like me, yada, yada, yada; hilarity ensues. It turned out upon further inspection (reading the sign) that it was none other than my mother’s high school which would add a whole other Back to the Future-y layer to the scenario, but I do eventually find the library and there is free coffee! The program, presented by Brooklyn College Library, METRO and the Brooklyn Museum focused on how libraries are inviting users to contribute, communicate and collaborate (a positive thing) and the interplay between cutting-edge technologies and privacy (a worrisome thing). The program was actually very good. (more…)