@brooklynmuseum I’m not sure which I pay more attention to, the conservation department or the many technology efforts, but I was really interested to read this breakdown of the project to upload images of the collection that have no known copyright restrictions to Wikimedia Commons.  

With 3,222 images uploaded to the Commons, the contribution is enormous and possibilities are staggering.  What if every major museum donated that amount of content?  

It brings to mind a lot of possibilities.  One of the things Wikipedia does organically is to categorize articles and images.  I wonder, though, if the categorization of the images in Wikipedia will, in the end, be more useful than the categorization done by the museum.  Or will it work the other way around?

For example, here are the commons images with the category of Albert Pinkham Ryder (a painter I love—the image above is by him and called “Summers Fruitful Pastures”).  Coupled with the article in Wikipedia about him, there’s probably more accurate information than the vast majority of museums have in their collections management systems.