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The institution

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The Museum's façade

The Brooklyn Museum, founded in 1895, is the second largest art museum in New York and among the largest in the United States; its permanent collection consists of more than one and a half million objects, spanning from Egyptian to contemporary art and it receives approximately 500,000 visitors annually. Acquisitions for the African collection[1] began in 1900 and continued in 1922 with works mainly coming the present Congo. Objects related to Egypt and North Africa are actually respectively grouped in the collections of Egyptian and Islamic art. For 20 years at the beginning of the last century, Stewart Culin, founding curator of the Department of Ethnology of the Museum and self-taught ethnologist, collected pieces from European traders in preparation for the big exhibition in April 1923 entitled Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Belgian Congo. For Culin these were real works of art, not mere ethnographic specimens, so the very act of putting them on display was regarded as an art installation in itself. On the Brooklyn's website several data[2] are available regarding that event (to the delight of art researchers), from Culin cards, notes and correspondence relating to the acquisitions and the organization of the exhibition, the catalog of the latter, review of the papers of the time, to photos of the rooms and the objects they contained. Over thirty[3] exhibitions about Africa followed, and the blog of the museum has a special section[4] with the latest news on the subject. There are thousands of items currently available in the museum, covering 2,500 years of human history and more than a hundred cultures of the continent; among the most valuable, a ndop figure[5] of King Mishe miShyaang maMbul, considered the oldest of its kind, and a mother and child[6] by Lulua peoples.

Statuette of a Kuba king
Lulua maternity figure

Overview of the partnership

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Hosting content owned by galleries, libraries, archives and museums around the world has become a tradition for the multimedia repository Wikimedia Commons. According to the page dedicated to these partnerships,[7] the first donation of contents dates back at least to 2007. But the WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge project managed to revive an existing partnership, and it is the second time this has happened within the project itself (see the previous article about The National Archives, UK). A collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum started (exceptionally because of their interest) in April 2010,[8] when they decided to autonomously upload on Commons all the images without copyright restrictions at their disposal; then there was a follow-up in the summer of 2012, when the rich and interesting collection of African art, Arts of Africa, was found suitable to be included in the WikiAfrica project. So the project resumed contacts with the Digital Lab/Digital Collections and Services sector to investigate the availability of the institution to adopt a free license for photos of statues, jewelry and other artifacts of "craft" of the continent. The museum at that time was already in the process of migrating contents to an extremely free Creative Commons license as the BY (Attribution).[9] After the donation was formalized and an OTRS ticket was issued,[10] it was time to proceed to the identification of "African" contents that could fit well within the general WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge frame.

Upload process

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It goes without saying: the manual import of a similar amount of data would not have been possible. As a matter of fact there is not just a single image for each object, but in many cases there are shots from multiple angles, even X-rays, a treat for students, experts and enthusiasts of art and conservation, not to mention the numerous information such as detailed descriptions, date, size, current location inside the museum and other notes, as well as a gallery of related files. Not being able to retrieve the same software that the museum had used in the past for a number of uploads, a willing bot operator was required to study the best way to download all the materials from the website of the museum and then upload them on Commons, with nicely formatted texts and so on. The search was kind of difficult, since operators specialized in this task are not many and they are always very busy with similar requests. However, the project managed to recruit the user Slick and sensitized him on the importance and urgency of the task in view of achieving the target of 30,000 contributions before the end of the project, later this year. Slick readily accepted the invitation and put himself to work, reporting regularly on his progress;[11] he also donated a page with the code and instructions he used,[12] allowing anyone to easily study them and, if needed, to replicate the same operations in the future.

Mask of Bwoom

Analysis of contents

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The results can be seen in commons:Category:WikiAfrica Brooklyn Museum, which, along with some archival footage for Egypt, contains photographs of dozens of masks, some of which are quite bizarre, anthropomorphic statuettes, carved ivory tusks, chairs and stools, pottery, doors, jewelry (eg. pendants in the shape of a cross), weapons (including arrows and spears), textiles and many other everyday objects. Since these photos were uploaded a few weeks ago, they are still largely unknown to the wikimedian community, with a notable exception, the mask of Bwoom for the Bushoong Kuba culture in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was nominated in September by the project tutor Michele Casanova to become a Featured picture on Commons[13] and after having been widely approved, it will appear on the main page of the project and of many different language editions of Wikipedia on 1 December.[14] Other photos in the meantime were used to illustrate, for example, the entries in French for the Mumuye, Buyu, Lokele, Obamba, Gola, Gbi, Nyangatom, Samburu and Kaffas people, the article in Ukrainian about African mythology and in Vietnamese about the city of Konso,[15] a World Heritage Site. To refine this donation a number of actions can be undertaken, from the improvement of existing categorizations with more specific ones to suggesting more precise titles and descriptions, from including more accurate geographical coordinates to translating the captions in multiple languages. At the end of November 2012 there are therefore 113 files (3% of the category) used in 122 entries from as many as 22 language editions of Wikipedia so far, including those in Arabic, Persian, Georgian, Russian and Slovak; one file has even appeared in the German version[16] of the new project of the Foundation, the travel guide Wikivoyage. Provisional data[17]revealed, finally, that from 1 October to the end of November all the files in the category collected more than forty thousand direct hits, a certainly respectable figure.

  • An Elvis Presley mask used by Nyau men (Chewa)
    An Elvis Presley mask used by Nyau men (Chewa)
  • Cap from a 3-piece royal or noble costume
    Cap from a 3-piece royal or noble costume
  • Chokwe chief's chair
    Chokwe chief's chair
  • Standing female nude holding a knife
    Standing female nude holding a knife
  • Mancala game board
    Mancala game board
  • Beaded crown (ade) of the ruler (ogoga) of Ikere
    Beaded crown (ade) of the ruler (ogoga) of Ikere
  • Dance Headdress
    Dance Headdress
  • 66 poisoned arrows in one bundle with shafts
    66 poisoned arrows in one bundle with shafts
  • X-ray of a monkey figure.
    X-ray of a monkey figure.

Of course, these results would not have been achieved had it not been for the continued cooperation of many volunteers; besides the already mentioned Slick, it is also necessary to mention users Ji-Elle and Avron who, improving the categorization respectively for populations and weapons, made the photos more organized and easy to find. Many thanks also go to Lori Byrd Phillips, coordinator of cultural partnerships in the U.S. for WMF who suggested who to contact within the museum, and last but not least of course to Deborah Wythe, Ruth Janson, Shelley Bernstein and Judith Frankfurt at the Brooklyn Museum who put the agreement into action allowing yet another, beautiful pearl to be added to the long necklace of GLAM partnerships in the Wikimedian world.

Results (November 2012)

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References

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  1. ^ Details in this section retrieved from Brooklyn_Museum#Arts_of_Africa and the corresponding Italian article.
  2. ^ http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/research/pna1923/
  3. ^ http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/exhibitions/african_art
  4. ^ http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/category/arts-of-africa/
  5. ^ More on this word on the Google Books page of the book Kuba by R. Leuchak.
  6. ^ For details, A Figure for Cibola: Art, Politics, and Aesthetics among the Luluwa People of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a paper by C. Petridis.
  7. ^ commons:Commons:Partnerships
  8. ^ More about this can be found on outreach:GLAM/Case studies/Brooklyn Museum and commons:Commons:Brooklyn Museum; actually the museum had already hosted a Wikipedia Loves Art event in 2009, and later it also launched a project on en.wiki, named WikiPop, aiming to write 25 biographies of female pop artists.
  9. ^ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
  10. ^ Ticket:2012072310006881
  11. ^ commons:Commons:Batch uploading/Brooklyn Museum
  12. ^ commons:Commons:Batch uploading/Brooklyn Museum/HowTo
  13. ^ commons:Commons:Featured picture candidates/File:Brooklyn Museum 73.178 Bwoom Mask.jpg
  14. ^ commons:Template:Potd/2012-12-01
  15. ^ it:Konso was recently updated by the Italian user:Kolghie for WikiAfrica
  16. ^ http://de.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Thema%3ANilkreuzfahrten
  17. ^ Personal processing of data automatically retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/.
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In the press

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