The Brooklyn Visual Heritage Website

The Brooklyn Visual Heritage Website

I learned about the Brooklyn Visual Heritage Website primarily from a 2014 conference paper written by Tulla Giannini and Jonathan Bowen entitled The Brooklyn Visual Heritage Website: Brooklyn’s Museums and Libraries Collaborate for Project CHART. Tulla Giannini is a dean and professor at Pratt Institute. Jonathan Bowen is a professor at Birmingham City University, UK. He was a visiting professor at Pratt Institute in 2012

Project overview

The Brooklyn Visual Heritage (BVH) project grew out of Project CHART (Cultural Heritage, Access, Research and Technology) which was a three-year IMLS-funded collaboration between Pratt SLIS (School of Information and Library Science) and three New York City cultural institutions: Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS), Brooklyn Museum (BM) and Brooklyn Public Library (BPL). The goals of Project CHART included “building and connecting the Brooklyn cultural heritage community; serving “educational and research needs of the Brooklyn community”; making collections more visible; and reaching new audiences. 

Pratt post-graduate students worked with the archivists, librarians and museum staff to digitize and provide public access to over three thousand photographs of 19^th and 20^th century Brooklyn from the partner institutions’ collections. The BVH project work also included the design and construction of a website where the public could explore these newly-available images. This site was launched in 2012 at http://www.brooklynvisualheritage.org/.

The website allows users to search for images by collection (institution), subject or location. Individual photograph scans are shown with contextual detail including title, date, author, description and location. User actions on the image include sharing through social media, printing, and requesting a reproduction. The copyright restrictions protecting the images are described by the collection holder (each of the three institutions has its own policies in place).

After the initial launch, Pratt students experienced in UX design performed usability testing on the site in Pratt’s Cultural Informatics Lab. Several important changes were made to the BVH site based on that testing, resulting in a cleaner, easier-to-navigate site. Although the CHART funding lasted from 2010-2013, the BVH site is still live and functional.

Brooklyn Visual Heritage now

BVH appears to be a successful project; a strong demonstration of its success is the continued activity on its website, three years after funding ended. The site, which launched in November 2012, still draws about 6,000 visits monthly. The site and project are still mentioned on Twitter as recently as January 2016, although the latest tweet by the project’s own account dates back to August 2013. Public response has mostly been positive, though some have complained about the decision to not use Creative Commons licensing for the images https://twitter.com/mccanner/status/309122562917531650. Users have applauded the project for offering public technical information on the website at http://www.brooklynvisualheritage.org/tech-info.

As mentioned above, Project CHART aimed to engage new users and to develop new partnerships; evidence of success here includes a former CHART student’s Geolocation Demo project at http://thisismattmiller.club/chart/, which places some of the historic Brooklyn photographs onto their corresponding locations on a map.

Benefits of participation

Pratt SILS gained much of value by participating in this initiative.  Using IMLS funding, they were able to develop their Digital Management for Cultural Heritage graduate program. It’s safe to assume that the development of this new curriculum and its underlying pedagogical model was deeply enriched by the dynamic relationships between the academic department and the cultural heritage institutions with which it was working. 

On a more individual level, 18 Pratt SILS students were provided with IMLS scholarship funding and gained invaluable professional and networking experience as they worked with BHS, BM and BPL staff to plan, design, implement, test and re-design the project site. The Pratt SILS department, in turn, can claim the ability to provide such real-world work experiences to its students - a particularly attractive feature in an LIS program as the LAMS landscape continues to shift in response to technology.

The Brooklyn Museum, Historical Society and Public Library benefit in some obvious ways. They received much publicity through press coverage and special launch events. One of the most common benefits reported from LAM and GLAM collaborations is the economic advantage of banding together, and that is also the case here. These cultural institutions had thousands of photographs, previously languishing in storage, digitized and shared with the public at no cost to their home institutions. At a time when so many collections face overwhelming backlogs, this is a truly valuable result. Each institution also gained a well-designed, elegant new web presence featuring images from their collections. Every one of their images links back to their institution’s home site, potentially driving additional traffic to their virtual and physical locations.

There may also be some more intangible rewards for these three institutions. Working relationships and connections were established that may lead to further collaboration in the future. Insights were ostensibly gained when museum curators, librarians and archivists worked side by side to plan and implement the project, revealing both the commonalities and differences in working styles, priorities and perspectives among these information professionals. Cross-institutional connections were forged based on the geographical location they have in common: Brooklyn, and therefore the community of Brooklyn itself benefits as the network of cultural information workers is strengthened.

Challenges of cross-institutional collaboration

Unfortunately, Giannini and Bowen do not describe in detail the ways in which archive, museum and library staff actually worked together on this project, they don’t lay out workflows or describe specific project tensions or frictions.  The authors do mention that cooperation requires “significant effort and understanding of the issues involved, with many financial considerations to be understood and agreed,” and also sketch out future challenges, such as how to use a site like BVH to boost physical museum attendance or to make visitor experiences more meaningful. Perhaps the connection between the virtual object and the physical object hasn’t yet been fully explored.

Really the only challenge delineated by Giannini and Bowen is the difficulty of attempting to streamline 3 collections from institutions committed to differing use policies.  The BVH site endeavors to bring the separate collections into a seamless whole, but the boundaries between the collections become apparent when the use policies differ depending on the owning institution.  Because the images are coming from different collections, they couldn’t be fully brought together under a blanket use policy.

The images also link back to their original digital “home” on the website of the museum, library or archive to which they belong, which could also be considered a kind of fracture or seam, disturbing the wholeness of the BVH collection. On the other hand, the permanent links for each image are located on the home collection sites, and these will be valuable for the semantic web. It may have been useful to include the permalinks on the individual image pages on the BVH site as well, instead of having to click through to the “original record”.

The authors list 6 “basic principles” they’ve learned from working with various cultural heritage institutions for over ten years. These can be summarized as 1) establishing good relationships with partners; 2) make sure partners’ and funders’ goals are aligned; 3) get funding and consider your funder a partner; 4) use consensus building and be flexible; 5) involve community in design and outreach; and 6) make the project sustainable.

Lessons learned -  Identify partners’ expertise

In the planning phases, partners worth collaborating with should be identified not only by interests and goals held in common, but also by the expertise they can offer to the project.  The value each partner can provide to the project and the benefits each partner can reap from the project should be clear at the outset.

Lessons learned -  Plan for sustainability

It is clear from this project that sustainability must be envisioned in the early project planning stages. In collaborative projects like CHART, temporary funding allows staff from participating institutions to work outside of their usual daily roles in order to complete the project. Once funding has ended, staff no longer have that freedom and flexibility. If a sustainable project requires ongoing staff work, that time must be built into staff workload as they return to their daily functions in their individual institutions. The BVH website can feel stagnant as the last tweets and blog posts (from 2013) are visibly aging on the front page. Ideally, tasks and responsibilities can be developed for staff members that will benefit their regular job duties and contribute to the sustainability of the collaborative project.