{"id":479,"date":"2009-04-16T14:39:49","date_gmt":"2009-04-16T13:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/electronicmuseum.org.uk\/?p=479"},"modified":"2022-12-04T12:16:28","modified_gmt":"2022-12-04T12:16:28","slug":"the-brooklyn-museum-api-qa-with-shelley-bernstein-and-paul-beaudoin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/2009\/04\/16\/the-brooklyn-museum-api-qa-with-shelley-bernstein-and-paul-beaudoin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Brooklyn Museum API – Q&A with Shelley Bernstein and Paul Beaudoin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The concept and importance of museum-based API’s are notions that I’ve written about consistently (boringly, probably) both on this blog and elsewhere on the web. Programmatic and open access to data is – IMO – absolutely key to ensuring the long-term success of online collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many conversations have been going on about how to make API’s happen over the last couple of years, and I think we’re finally seeing these conversations move away from niche groups of enthusiastic developers (eg. Mashed Museum<\/a> ) into a more mainstream debate<\/a> which also involves budget holders and strategists. These conversations have been aided by metrics from social media sites like Twitter which indicate that API access figures sometimes outstrip “normal web” browsing by a factor of 10 or more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On March 4th 2009, Brooklyn Museum announced the launch<\/a> of their API, the latest in a series of developments around their online collection<\/a>. Brooklyn occupies a space which generates a fair amount of awe in museum web circles: Shelley Bernstein and team are always several steps in front of the curve – innovating rapidly, encouraging a “just do it” attitude, and most importantly, engaging wholly with a totally committed tribe of users. Many other museum try<\/strong> to do social media. Brooklyn lives<\/strong> social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, as they say – without further ado – here’s Shelley and Paul talking about what they did, how they did it, and why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: First and foremost, could you please introduce yourselves – what your main roles and responsibilities are and how you fit within the museum.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology. I manage the department that runs the Museum’s helpdesk, Network Administration, Website, gallery technology, and social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paul Beaudoin, Programmer. I push data around on the back-end and build website features and internal tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: Can you explain in as non-technical language as possible what exactly the Brooklyn API is, and what it lets people do?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n SB: It\u2019s basically a way outside programmers can query our Collections data<\/a> and create their own applications using it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: Why did you decide to build an API? What are the main things you hope to achieve …and what about those age old “social web” problems like authority, value and so-on?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n SB: First, practical… in the past we’d been asked to be a part of larger projects where institutions were trying to aggregate data across many collections (like d*hub). At the time, we couldn’t justify allocating the time to provide data sets which would become stale as fast as we could turn over the data. By developing the API, we can create this one thing that will work for many people so it no longer become a project every time we are asked to take part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, community… the developer community is not one we’d worked with before. We’d recently had exposure to the indicommons community<\/a> at the Flickr Commons and had seen developers like David Wilkinson do some great things<\/a> with our data there. It’s been a very positive experience and one we wanted to carry forward into our Collection, not just the materials we are posting to The Commons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Third, community+practical… I think we needed to recognize that ideas about our data can come from anywhere, and encourage outside partnerships. We should recognize that programmers from outside the organization will have skills and ideas that we don’t have internally and encourage everyone to use them with our data if they want to. When they do, we want to make sure we get them the credit they deserve by pointing our visitors to their sites so they get some exposure for their efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: How have you built it? (Both from a technical and a project perspective: what platform, backend systems, relationship to collections management \/ website; also how long has it taken, and how have you run the project?)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n