Brooklyn Browser
Posted by striatic in Tools
Last week, the Brooklyn Museum released a public API allowing outside programmers access to their extensive Collections database. While the Flickr API allows developers access to the Brooklyn Museum’s images on Flickr, uploads are made over time so that people can more easily follow and add metadata to the collection as it accumulates. Consequently, the vast majority of the Brooklyn Museum’s Collection is not yet available via Flickr, and is inaccessible via the Flickr API.
The Brooklyn Museum’s API is inspired by Flickr’s, and structured very similarly to it as well. This has allowed Indicommons chief of development David Wilkinson to build Brooklyn Browser, a simple but effective tool for searching and browsing the museum’s collection inside an Adobe Flash–based interface. The advantage here is simplicity and speed. After running a basic keyword or name search, the results can be clicked on and expanded without having to load up additional pages, making it much easier and faster to browse through images in the collection.
This tool may be a work in progress, and is limited to 20 results per search, but it demonstrates how adopting elements of the Commons can benefit internal collections. Open APIs allow services and collections to become interconnected, the experience of outside developers to be engaged, and new tools and spaces to be fashioned to benefit the community at large.