FAQ
Utilizing YouTube Quick Capture for Community Voices
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
RSS 
Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum 
November 24th, 2008 at 10:16 am
hello, thank you for sharing this. i work for a french museum and i am very interessed in knowing how this video experiment is going as i am thinking about a similar setup for a temporary exhibition here and i never done anything like that…
November 24th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
This looks fantastic! What a great idea - our President-elect is pioneering YouTube for the Presidency, and I love that you’re pioneering this for museums. You’ll definitely have to keep us posted on what you find.
November 25th, 2008 at 4:52 am
[…] l’expérience que nous raconte le Brooklyn Museum dans le dernier article de son blog..C’est autour de la nouvelle exposition temporaire du Brooklyn Museum, intitulée The Black […]
November 26th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Shelley,
This is an incredible idea! Please report back on how it goes, i.e. regarding “goofs”, comment spam, etc.
Chris Alexander
November 30th, 2008 at 11:33 pm
This sounds brilliant. My work is to create and develop methods for public engagement, and I have been ruminating on this sort of thing for the past few weeks. This morning I stumbled across your website; consequently, I’m having a mild overload. I’m really looking forward to reading your updates!
Daryl Shires
Western Australian Museum
December 1st, 2008 at 6:32 pm
As always….brilliant!!
December 2nd, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Definitely copying this idea…great work.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:50 am
Wow. Great Idea. Probably going to steal it and use it for our next conference. I’d love to see how it goes. Thanks!
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:00 pm
I am working on a similar project at the ECHO Lake Aquarium & Science Center in Burlington Vermont to capture stories about the lake and lake water issues. Many of your concerns have been mine as well! Editing…ugh, quality of the video clips, affordability of the “capture kiosk”. I truly look forward to following this on your blog and the YouTube channel. Many, many thanks for posting this as it will indeed help us with our project!
December 4th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Hey everyone, many thanks for such a great response on this. I’m going to do a much larger round-up of our experiences with these kiosks in March when the show winds down, but a quick note if you are implementing before I get to publish that in-depth post. We had a some technical trouble (crashing, sound mismatches, pixelated capture) in the early videos and think we’ve solved it by prioritizing traffic on that part of the LAN and enabling flow control at the switch side. So you need a strong LAN connection where you can tweak a bit if you are seeing problems…and whatever you do, I think this would be a real nightmare over wifi
We also found lights were needed to help the cameras and we grabbed those at ikea for very little money.
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Quick update: Mattress Factory (one of my favorite places in the world) is using Quick Capture for a new project to get feedback - check out Jeffrey’s blog post here. Thanks for the props Jeffrey - super happy to see you guys using this!
January 5th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
[…] Capture feature. Mattress Factory’s Jeffrey Inscho got the idea from the Brooklyn Museum, who built a video response station for their exhibition The Black List Project using the same technology. Both illustrate ways museums […]