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Flickr Commons: Coping with a Small Staff and Community Ideals

Shelley Bernstein on December 4, 2008

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.

As I mentioned in my last post, what was once a small town turned into a big, booming metropolis when we joined The Commons. Previously there had been a lot of discussion going on about the current happenings of the institution and those discussions were quick, easy and (most of all) fun exchanges. We could get back to people within 24 hours and really engage in a personal way—it was clear to everyone (we hope) that someone was home—that we were there to put a personal face on the institution and we took that very seriously.

We find the exchanges at The Commons are fundamentally different than what we had been experiencing and they tend to be more time consuming for us. This is high-traffic, so we exponentially increased exposure to all the materials on our account by a lot more than what we had been used to. Each time a new institution joins The Commons, the publicity from it drives more traffic our way. This issue doesn't really go away—it just becomes an even greater challenge to manage our time. You might be asking at this point, don't we all want higher traffic for our materials? What could possibly be the problem here and why could it possibly outweigh the benefit of more exposure?



True enough, we've seen a lot of fantastic things happen with the material because of this exposure, but we've also been grappling with the staff time it takes to respond to people in a meaningful way. For one, often people just tell us how much they really like something we've uploaded, and while that's really nice, it creates a lot of filtering through those responses to ensure we don't miss the questions people may have or the contributions they have to offer. For instance, I once missed a major contribution for way too long just because it got buried (ummm, yikes).

Also, it's been more difficult to get to know this group of people on a personal level. This rolls round to the big, bustling city again. In the small town, we thrilled to see responses like the above because we knew (or were getting to know) the people who were leaving the comments. Now, it's a bit overwhelming and I often feel as if we can't engage the way we used to (there have been some exceptions here, but this is my general feeling).



Sometimes we see that visitors to The Commons will ask questions casually (example above) as a way of engaging, but it can provide us with a difficult task—meaningful responses take a decent amount of research and time.



When we get contributions that can lead us in the right direction and fill in a missing piece of the puzzle, we want to verify that before changing our own records and this verification process takes time. It's pretty fantastic that we are getting this kind of response, but the verification takes enough time that I often feel it gives the impression there is a void of interaction on our account because we don't respond as quickly as we'd like. The kind of response time shown above is an eternity on the www, but a reality for us given the amount of resources we have (read on...).



As we take this break to examine the cause and effect of all of this, we have to consider just how strapped we are for staff time. To give you an idea, we have one Archivist (Angie) who's been working with a volunteer researcher (Ed, you are awesome) in order to maintain the account. I help by going through the incoming responses and manage things by sending things to Angie and Ed that need a response or those really whiz-bang cool things they will want to know about. Given that this needs to be less than 1/10 of what we do on a normal basis, keeping up can be a bit stressful for all of us. It's ironic that smaller institutions can now take advantage of a system like this since it may create other problems when there are fewer people to share the workload (or, at least, this has been a challenge for us).

What's interesting for me personally is that this equation—our presence on social networks, our e-comment books, the Posse, this blog, etc.—had never, ever presented a problem. It was always a very doable amount of time and always, always, always a very personal engagement, but the higher traffic at The Commons has somewhat tipped the balance in this one instance and it makes it an interesting case study.

The great news is the assets are being seen by a broader audience (another primary part of our mission), we are gaining a better understanding of how people are using our materials (something we really need to know) and we've seen a lot engagement (which can be really awesome), but in trying to maintain our own ideals in how we approach community on the web, we are cautious moving forward. In thinking about how to resume our uploads to The Commons, I have a feeling you'll see fewer uploads overall at a much slower pace so we can keep up.

If you've made it this far...fun news is coming at the end of the week, so hope to see you then!

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Flickr Commons: A Delicate Balance

Shelley Bernstein on December 1, 2008

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.

When we established an account on Flickr back in 2006 (was it that long ago?), the idea was simple: reach out to make personal connections with our visitors and extend the visit. Our first uploads were centered around our Graffiti exhibition—document an interactive in the gallery, so visitors could see their contribution, share with others and discover how the interactive changed over time. What we found was an incredibly rich community of users who wanted to engage with us and after Graffiti we continued sharing the daily life of the institution in various ways often uploading photos of gee-whiz-behind-the-scenes. For the most part, it was kind of a small town over there - even with 1500 contacts, I could pretty definitively say I knew many of them and easily kept up with the goings-on at their feeds. Though we'd hear from people in all parts of the world, for the most part, this was a local community with many of our most active contributors living right down the street or very close by and visiting often.

Now, jump to two years later. Flickr created The Commons and joining to share our archival material seemed really natural to us, but we were firm—we didn't want to open a separate account for these photographs. We felt (and still do today) that the content shouldn't be split. Given the exposure Flickr gives to The Commons, it seemed as if the creation of a second Commons-only account would send the wrong message to our current Flickr community—as if this material was somehow more important than everything else and we just didn't think that was fair to either the community or the materials to separate it. Flickr understood where we were going with this and graciously created what is now known as the "blended" account, where we could continue uploading daily life and add Commons material to the mix.

Initially, we were worried there would be confusion—would people mistake one type of content for another in a blended account? On the contrary, we've found most people are pretty clear on the differences and this has confirmed our general feeling that Flickr is a great place to be where people really take-in and process what is going on. That said, we've had some unexpected issues crop up and we wonder if it may be as a result of the type of materials we initially decided to upload to The Commons.

Paris Exposition: night view, Paris, France, 1900. Night view includes the Ponte Alexandre III. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection (S03_06_01_015 image 2012).

The idea was to use materials we already had on hand and, since Flickr is a global community, begin by uploading materials that were of general interest. We began by uploading shots of expositions in Paris and Chicago and images of Egypt. Two things may have happened as a result of this strategy. First, we quickly found was our small town turned into a big, booming metropolis (something I'm going to talk more about in the next post). Second, it seems as if the people engaging with The Commons materials may have different motivation than our original, more local audience. The Commons audience cares deeply about the material we uploaded, but perhaps are not as invested in who houses it. In turn, we've noticed that our original Flickr audience doesn't seem to respond much to The Commons material we upload (they seem more invested in place and, therefore, the daily-life-of-the-institution photos we still publish). In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense and, as a result, the types of interaction that are happening on the account are just not as balanced as we'd like.

Irving Underhill, American, 1872-1960. Luna Park and Surf Avenue, Coney Island, 1912. Archival inkjet print. Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection. mp1-1996.164.8-B19045.

If we had to do it all over again, we would not change our position regarding the need for the blended account, but I think we might have re-considered what those first Commons uploads would have been. We have a series of glass negatives that depict scenes of old Brooklyn and, looking back, I think this material might have split the difference and engaged both audiences a bit better. I'm leaning in this direction because we have seen some crossover with our Egyptian materials and this makes a lot of sense given that the museum is known for its Egyptian collection—this is content that speaks to both the Commons audience and our local visitors. Then, perhaps, slowly branching out into Paris and Chicago might have brought everyone together as we all grew.

As we pause to consider our next steps, it leaves Deirdre, Angie and me thinking about what kinds of materials to upload in the next round in the hopes that we can create a more delicate balance between these two worlds.

In the next post, I'll be discussing challenges with the workload.

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Portrait of a Librarian

Beth Kushner on October 27, 2008

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.

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