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.

Indicommons Chief of Development David Wilkinson recently investigated the distribution of tags across the Flickr Commons, creating the following graph from the data he accumulated.

Since almost every institution adds its institution name as a tag to every photo it uploads, every Commons photo possesses at least one tag. This accounts for the spike on the far left. The second spike, at three tags, is probably due to institutions like the Library of Congress adding a couple of institution specific “machine tags” to every photo they upload.

With this knowledge we can assume that many of the photos in the Commons with 3 or fewer tags have not been tagged by a Flickr member. Perhaps 2,500 or more of the 12,000 or so photos in Commons have not received any “member” tags. At around 20%, these untagged photos represent a sizable percentage of the Commons collection.

While the relatively large number of untagged photos in the collection is unfortunate, the graph also indicates that when Flickr members turn their attention to tagging photos, they add a significant number of tags. The graph’s curve crests at 9 or 10 tags, more than enough to thoroughly describe the visual contents of each image. Many photos receive even more tags than that. Indeed, David’s analysis was spurred by Shelley Mannion’s recent remark on Twitter that the Library of Congress had reached Flickr’s 75-tag-per-photo limit on certain uploads.

The following 15 photos from the Library of Commons collection possess 70 or more tags:

Library of Congress

Spreading this wealth of metadata seems to depend on connecting the untagged Commons photos with tag-happy Flickr members, who are clearly very industrious, in an effort to prevent photos from falling through the cracks and remaining entirely untagged.

Indicommons.org isn’t just about about blogging about Flickr Commons–related news, showcasing Commons-related research and community-generated “subcuration”. We’re also active in creating new tools to follow, search and sort the Commons collections.

Our Chief of Development, David Wilkinson, recently responded to a request from the Brooklyn Museum to improve their Flickr upload workflow. Commons institutions like the Brooklyn Museum tend to upload sets of images to Flickr as “private”, add initial metadata and then eventually switch the photos in the set to “public” in order to expose them to the Flickr community. A problem with this method is that during this switch the photo upload dates remain in the past and the photos do not appear in many of Flickr’s recent uploads feeds.

To address this issue, David created a web application that uses Flickr’s API in order to update the upload dates of every photo in a set. This allows institution staff to update upload dates as they switch a set of photos from private to public, allowing the photos to appear freshly uploaded. The Batch Date Changer allows Commons photos receive maximum exposure while lightening the burden on institution staff.

This application is currently being used by the Brooklyn Museum and will soon be made available to all Flickr Commons institutions.