Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

The Black List Project just opened last week and our education staff really wanted to include visitor response as part of the exhibition. Typically, we do this with our electronic comment books which have been working well for us, but the educators felt that a more personal storytelling was what they were looking for with this show and incorporating video would help fulfill those needs.

The original idea was to set up recording times and take quick video responses in the gallery, but knowing how much editing work would come our way…my response was a very fast and very frustrated “we can’t possibly take this on.” We started thinking about self-service video kiosks, but quickly found engineering a custom solution was going to drain too much staff time and products for purchase were insanely expensive, so no go. Argh!

…well, we found a way and it’s simple enough that anyone can do it. We are taking advantage of YouTube’s Quick Capture feature, which allows anyone to use a webcam to directly record a video to their YouTube channel. We grabbed the two Macbooks we had used for Click!…setup a YouTube channel for the exhibition…fired up the webcams…and locked everything down with wKiosk. Presto, a working video kiosk with no overhead! I couldn’t be more excited that we were able to find a Scrappy-Doo solution that got us over the technical and budgetary hurdles.

Now that we’ve got these working, we are all a little curious to see what in the world happens. There’s plenty of monkey-business going on with our e-comment books—I always joke that you always know when there’s a school group in the building That’s to be expected, though. There’s no established community around those books and they can be completely anonymous, so it’s easy to see why someone will goof off. For the most part, the e-comment books work well, we get meaningful comments and discussion from them. Our visitors have come to expect them and we recommend this system as something that has had great benefit (if you are interested in implementing, you might take a look at Nina Simon’s recent post for some ideas).

I have to wonder, though, what happens when you turn a camera on? Are there fewer goof-offs because comments are tied directly to an identity (at first glance, that’s probably too optimistic)? Are there fewer responses because visitors are less comfortable with this format? Are responses more personal because the act of commenting is more confessional (despite the tech glitches we are still working through, maybe yes)? These video kiosks are out in the open in a large space…are people attracted to that or would they rather have a more private setting like a booth? Do visitors shy away from it by the very nature that the resulting video is hosted on YouTube?

Clearly, we have more questions than answers right now and I’m betting we may make adjustments as we go through the run, but it’s kind of fun to try something new and you just know I’ll report back on what we learn

You’ve been walking around a museum for several hours looking at hundreds of artworks, and want to take a break and sit for a minute. . . . whether to chat with a friend, rest your feet, or to spend a few minutes gazing at a particularly interesting artwork . . . but, alas, can’t find a seat. And so you walk some more, ask a guard, and you might find the odd chair or bench. At the Brooklyn Museum, we have been especially sensitive to this situation, as there are over 250,000 square feet of exhibition space to walk through. Over the years, as we’ve developed new permanent and temporary exhibitions, as well as public spaces, we have included seating as an important element in the design plan.

There can be many different approaches to Museum seating. In our American Identities galleries, we created four seating islands, which consist of a carpeted area with chairs and reading tables. In our new contemporary galleries, we have incorporated commercial furniture: Kartell’s “Plastics” line of modular seating. And at other times we have created custom seating, such as the benches in our Egypt Reborn galleries, which have Egyptian revival stylings.

Our most recent response to the public’s need for seating, can be found in the Museum’s first floor Rubin Pavilion. After a lengthy process of experimentation, I arrived at a design that blended both geometrically and materially with the Polshek designed lobby, which had opened in 2004. Using solid white ash, clear stain infused with aluminum powder, and textured and waxed aluminum i-beams, the benches were expertly built and finished by the Museum’s carpentry and paint departments.

Photo by Naoko’s Stoop via Flickr. All Rights Reserved.

Like a lot of custom furniture, these benches are built to last, very durable and will be enjoyed by Museum visitors for many, many years.

Last month, I was speaking at the Technology in the Arts Conference in Pittsburgh and a real highlight for me was taking a visit to the Mattress Factory. I’ve been a big fan and my first visit included a great lunch with Barbara Luderowski and Jeffrey Insoo to talk all things tech.

Jeffrey mentioned a collaboration that they were just about to release. It’s been hard to keep this a secret and when you see what they’ve cooked up with you’ll see why. Artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsleyn worked with Google Street View to stage a community performance right outside the Mattress Factory’s home of Sampsonia Way. MF has posted a “making of” on YouTube and Jeffrey has more about the project on the MF blog.

I have to stop gushing about the MF now, but I’ll say one last thing: the place is spectacular in real life too, so check out Street View and be sure to go in person if you are in Steel City!

I’ve already reported on many of the really cool things that can happen when participating in a venture like this one. We continue to get feedback on all kinds of usage and it’s been great to see people discovering these images and working with them in different ways.

World’s Columbian Exposition: Ferris Wheel, Chicago, United States, 1893. View of Ferris Wheel, [which dwarfs surrounding buildings,] Sept.; Starks W. Lewis, Amateur, Brooklyn, N.Y. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection (S03_06_01_016 image 2194).

One day, we came in to a fantastic surprise: Brian Karpuck re-used materials on his blog to create a walking tour of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This is exactly what we were hoping for—mash-ups that would highlight the materials at hand and show them off in creative ways. Check out his posts and the panorama he created (thanks, Brian!):

Touring the Chicago World’s Fair: The Court of Honor in Pictures
More Pictures From the White City
The Original Ferris Wheel in Pictures
Chicago’s World’s Fair: The Remains of the Day

When people ask me how things are going for us with The Commons, I immediately think of friends on Facebook who’ve listed their relationship status as “it’s complicated.” Even with really, really great stuff going on like Brian’s effort to further define our Chicago resources, we’ve had confusion and frustration of our own making. As it turns out, the rights statement we were using on The Commons wasn’t clear enough. Our institutional policy is to release as much material possible, but we do reserve the rights for commercial use because the money that is made from those uses helps us take care of the collections we own. We realized that our own statement on Flickr was generating confusion because it didn’t state these expectations one way or another.

Like everything we jump into, we change and adjust as needed. In this instance, we’ve clarified our rights statement and wait to see if this change eliminates confusion. In the meantime, we are holding off uploading anything else until we can see if this resolves some of the issues we’ve been facing. We are hopeful these changes will help and the 2000+ images I’ve got cloaked on our Flickr feed can be released soon.

There have been other complications. We started to see our images in The Commons migrating to Wikimedia Commons. Check out discussions here and here. Initially a template was created that would mirror the rights statements, but that template is now slated for deletion—take a look at this discussion. We ended up resolving the issue by working with an editor at Wikimedia directly and after this help, good news, all of the Brooklyn Museum Commons images that were uploaded to Wikimedia link back to our now-clarified rights statement (example) which puts us more at ease. Working with the wiki editors has been a really positive experience and it leaves me thinking about ways we can do a better job of working with this community, so stay tuned!

We’ve had some other Commons-related issues going on as well (all of our own making, which easily fall under the “be careful what you wish for” category), but this is already a long post, so e-mail me if you want more info on those.