GLAM/Case studies/Brooklyn Museum

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Brooklyn Museum image upload

On April 12, 2010, Brooklyn Museum began a project to upload all "No Known Copyright Restrictions" images to the Wikimedia Commons, the central media repository of the Wikimedia Foundation. As of May 2011 3,851 files were uploaded by Brooklyn Museum.

Technical details

Work progressed in several steps:

1. Brooklyn Museum opened two user accounts: User:BrooklynMuseum and User:BrooklynMuseumBot. One for manual and and one for automatic edits and uploads.
2. Customized software written in PHP and based on [BotClasses.php] were used to cast image metadata from the format used by the museum to the format used at Wikimedia Commons. This software was responsible for the upload under the name User:BrooklynMuseumBot.
   • Commons Artwork template used for image description allows inclusion of artist, title, date, credit lines (ex. "Gift of ..."), museum accession number, link to the museum page for each artifact, object dimension and object location. Additional field, like object history, inscriptions, and references are also available.
   • Special attention was paid to use existing Commons templates for artists, and internationalization templates for technique, dimensions, etc. Commons internationalization templates are used to translate finale set of standard phrases and terms to the language of the user viewing the page. This way file metadata is accessible to larger international community.
3. User:BrooklynMuseum and larger community of Wikimedia volunteers created numerous new artists information pages and are still involved in ongoing categorization process.

References

• Brooklyn Museum Blog: Cross-posting the Collection to Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive
• Commons:Category:Images from Brooklyn Museum
• Commons:Commons:Brooklyn Museum
• Commons:Commons:Bots/Requests/BrooklynMuseumBot

Wikipedia Article Development

The Brooklyn Museum developed Wikipedia articles on the undercovered topic of female pop artists, to tie in with an upcoming exhibition. The articles were displayed on iPads in the galleries alongside the artworks, and visitors were also able to go "down the rabbit hole" to other Wikipedia articles. The iPad app has also been released as open source.

• Brooklyn Museum Blog: WikiPop

WikiAfrica and Share Your Knowledge

The Museum joined these projects in 2012 by donating almost 3,800 pictures for Wikimedia Commons: a case study is available on the English and Italian Wikipedia.