Brooklyn Museum Library & Archives Donor Database

The Brooklyn Museum is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. Its roots extend back to 1823 and the founding of the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library to educate young tradesmen. Now with more than 500,000 artifacts within its collection The Brooklyn Museum is one of the most valuable and globally recognized museums in human history.

  • In 2012 as a result of the recession, The Brooklyn Museum Development office was in desperate need of additional grant & funding opportunities, required to continue the museums 100+ year legacy of inclusive and diverse programing necessary for the next fiscal years.

  • Utilize internal and external mixed method research, to uncover and or create viable grant and funding opportunities.

  • Role : Sole Researcher/Individual Contributor reporting to the Director of Institutional and Individual Giving.

    Timeline : 4 months

    No budget

Multi Stage Design Research

Starting with preliminary research, I created a mixed method sprint intended to better understand the experience within each department. In addition to uncovering the needs, wants and desires within each team. This phase of the project took a total of 6 weeks to complete. The secondary research stage focused solely on mapping out user flows between the key stakeholders and their wants, needs and pain-points

  • • Team/Stakeholder Contextual Inquiry

    • Field Observations

    • KPI Data Analysis

  • • Heuristic Evaluations

    • Identified a service design opportunity involving and overlap of KPI’s between : The Library & Archives, The Development Department, Museum IT Department

System Design Development

As a result of the 2 month research sprint, it appears as though both the Development Department and The Library & Archives receive millions of dollars worth of donates a year. The issue was : there was no formal data process in the Library & Archives that would reflect these donations within the Development records. This was a cirital discovery!

Without the account of the Library & Archives donations, the museum was essentially undervaluing their collection which affected the amount of Federal funding they were able to access based off the museums total value of assets.

Over the remaining two months of the project I went through over one thousand tangible and intangible artifacts and assets. Organized by collections, I was able to meticulously document key design features, donor information and estimated value of the asset. To create the core information architecture foundation for the museums newest internal database.

Housed within the Library & Archives this database linked with the Development Departments platforms to ensure accurate funding. The tool launched the day I left and has recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary August 2022.