Brooklyn Museum Collection & Posse

The Brooklyn Museum recently launched a project to put our Collection online with three distinct goals. First, make the data available for researchers and scholars. Second, provide a way a casual user could just jump in and start to visually navigate throughout. Third, create an interface that would be in keeping with our mission and our community-oriented goals. All of these factors are in careful balance. The strict data is there in clearly formatted areas and we provide an easy way to print this kind of information. We’ve implemented a very visual "related" column to promote browsing and accidental discoveries (serendipity is key). We’ve created a social component (The Posse) where visitors can create accounts and then anything they favorite, tag or comment on will be attributed to them both in the collection area and on their profiles.

The social component is just a beginning for us and we started by implementing tagging in a slightly new way. The goal with tagging on our site is not just to gain search terms, but also to allow our visitors ownership of the collection – tagging on their terms and then attributing those tags publicly to their own Posse accounts. In this way, tagging becomes a social activity on our site. Now when Posse members contribute, their contribution is credited and we get to know more about the visitors who are helping us to apply terms to our objects. To date, the Posse has created 18,924 tags on collection objects and 74.3% of the collection online has been tagged by Posse.

Collection Online: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/collections/

The Posse: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/posse/

Tagged collection record (see: Tags by Posse): http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/766/Mano_Poderosa_(The_All-Powerful_Hand),_or_Las_Cinco_Personas_(The_Five_Persons)

The mission of the Brooklyn Museum is to act as a bridge between the rich artistic heritage of world cultures, as embodied in its collections, and the unique experience of each visitor. Dedicated to the primacy of the visitor experience, committed to excellence in every aspect of its collections and programs, and drawing on both new and traditional tools of communication, interpretation, and presentation, the Museum aims to serve its diverse public as a dynamic, innovative, and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts.

Our mission carries forth from our Director, Arnold Lehman, to our exhibitions, programs, and services, and through our Web site. Conscious of this community-oriented mission we aim to further engage our current on-line audiences and simultaneously grow an interactive Web community. The museum is committed community participation (both physical and online) and we aim to offer content that people care about, creating a platform for discussion, listening to what visitors have to say and responding.

The Collection online works within these goals to share our objects with our visitors, allow them ownership over content and recognize their contributions.