Future Plan #2, 2003 by Hiroko Okada

Playing with the "tags" feature in the Brooklyn Museum of Art's online site can make for an addictive and illuminating stretch of time. You can play with their tag cloud and explore art that, like in the example above, is tagged "funny," or you can embark on helping the museum add tags to its collection with their new Tag! You're It! recent innovation. Or, if you're feeling more critic-than-creator you can even weigh in on decisions such as a given tag's relevance in their built-in feature to do such a thing called Freeze Tag! Go ahead: try it. I've been playing around with it a full half-hour while I've procrastinated writing this post.

The point of my highlighting this activity is that it's only one of many such investments in information sharing, collecting and communicating that the Brooklyn Museum of Art has staked out and stood by in the past decade. In a recent article in the Huffington Post, our own Jonathan Melber observed:

When it comes to progressive, public-friendly copyright policies, few art museums can match The Brooklyn Museum. In 2004, it was the first art museum to adopt a Creative Commons license, allowing any non-commercial copying of any image in which the museum holds the copyright. In 2008, it was the third institution to join the Flickr Commons, making available high-resolution images of Public Domain artworks from its collection. Last week, the musuem published the detailed copyright status of every image in its online collection--that's over 12,000 artworks--and made this information available through its API so that anyone can easily cross-reference the data with their own copyright research. It also switched to a less restrictive Creative Commons license, allowing non-commercial remixing as well.

Or, to put it in layman's terms as Mike Ellis did writing at the electronic museum, "Many other museums try to do social media. Brooklyn lives social media."

Aside from the painstaking and oftentimes monotonous work of digitizing and rights-cataloging a ginormous art collection, Melber rightly points out that it's the ethos driving the Brooklyn Museum's action that is so exemplary, and which other cultural institutions should pay some heavy mind to:

It is easier and safer, from a liability perspective, to only display thumbnails of artworks and to put the onus of clearing copyrights in specific images on members of the public who seek to use them. But it is more consistent with a non-profit cultural institution's public mission to make its collection as accessible as possible, as transparently as possible.

Likewise, despite the common (though questionable) view that it's more lucrative for museums to assert as much control over their "intellectual property" as copyright law allows, the Brooklyn Museum apparently understands that its mission is more effectively fulfilled, and the public better served, when the museum allows its collection to be reproduced, remixed and disseminated in as many (non-commercial) ways as possible.

If you are a regular reader of this site or sites like it, if you've got a twitter feed, a facebook page, a flickr account—any or all of these things—chances are you have come to understand the reach and the relevancy that social media can provide. You may not know an API from Magnum PI, but if you understand how making information—in this instance the information is ART—accessible and available to be shared, disseminated, commented upon, then you have some of the understanding of what it is to be a member of a digital community. If you'd like to share in the example of being a gold-star member of the digital community, you could earn some good karma by doing things like adding tags or comments to the Flickr Commons, an amassing of the world's public photo collections culled from participating member institutions (like the Brooklyn Museum, plus a slew of others).

Another great read with an interview between Creative Commons and the Brooklyn Museum's Chief of Technology Shelley Bernstein can be found on the Creative Commons Blog. The Brooklyn Museum also has a group blog of its own right here.

All of the ways the Brooklyn Museum is using the internet to innovatively connect with their collectors made them a natural collaborator for a recent benefit edition. If you missed Valerie Hegarty's First Harvest in the Wilderness With Pileated Woodpecker, prints are still available and come with a free one-year membership to Brooklyn Museum's 1stfans: a socially networked museum membership.