Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Duke Riley has been on our minds a lot over the past month. I’ve received a crash course in his work and the man himself as a result of the Museum’s involvement with his naval battle “Those Who Are About To Die, Salute You,” which played out (in all of its insane, tomato-stained glory) two weeks ago. As I was busy getting pelted with tomatoes from point-blank range, it dawned on me that Duke had created a very “New York” experience. This is the type of spectacle—getting a couple thousand people to wear togas to a mock naval battle fought in a public park in the middle of Queens—that is completely ridiculous and yet seems somewhat unsurprising given what goes on daily here in NYC.

Duke and Squirrel via pixietart on Flickr.  All Rights Reserved.

What we have not done so far in the eight months of the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed is feature someone whose art often involves New York City itself, and that is why we’re pleased to announce that Duke Riley is going to be the Twitter Art Feed artist for September. Like other artists who have participated in the Feed, Duke’s work is in the Museum’s collection. That piece, “The Bright Passage” (2006), depicts the imagined inhabitants of Mill Rock Island, a little-known piece of NYC real estate just north of Roosevelt Island on the East River.

Duke has spent time in some of New York City’s least-visited (and accessible) spots, so we thought it would be interesting for him to give 1stfans access to the New York city he has come to know. Hence, “Duke Riley’s Map of New York City,” which will be an online map on which Duke will tweet out the locations that relate directly to his work. He’ll tweet out a location and a sentence about what that location means to him every couple days, and then at the end of the month the map will provide insight into how one of New York’s most notable (and notorious) artists working today.

Update 10/1/09 - Now that September is over, we thought it would be nice to share Duke’s map with everyone. Below is Duke Riley’s Map of New York City, which was revealed to 1stfans members via twitter over the last month:

View Duke Riley’s Map of New York City in a larger map

Ever wish you could remix the gallery experience?  When I walk into a museum I enjoy the structure—the information given, which objects have been placed where, the specific sequence in which the space has been designed—but I will admit, there are times when I want something else too….something that’s a bit off the charts and possibly something that is always subject to change.  I’m positive this other need has something to do with all those Choose Your Own Adventure books I was hooked on as a kid.

Today, we are launching BklynMuse, a gallery guide that is designed to complement the more structured museum experience.  In its most basic form, it’s a community-powered recommendation system for the objects that are on display here.  As visitors move through the galleries, they can recommend objects to other visitors.  Based on the  recommendations you give it, this muse will crunch the collective data and present other suggestions for you as you move from room to room.  The guide does other stuff too—it gives access to our cell-phone audio stops, our YouTube videos—but the real power in the device comes from visitors sharing their own takes in our galleries.

This is one of a series of things we are implementing to bridge both the online experience with the in-person visit.  In the case of BklynMuse, Posse members get their recommendations saved to their profiles for future reference—think of it as bookmarking your favs on the go in the gallery and then being able to access them later.  Even more than that, Posse members can create sets of objects on our website and annotate them and, if you choose to sign into your Posse account on BklynMuse, your sets will be right there waiting for you to follow in the gallery.  Those same sets can be shared and featured for other visitors to see, so your voice…your notes…your selections…may be highlighted, in all their Posse glory, for all to see.

For those of you reading the blog, you know I’ve been on a bit of a failure kick lately—cautious observations of visitors glued to screens and kiosks that drive me slightly bonkers—you may be wondering how this could possibly be different.   We designed this interface as more like a scavenger hunt than a multimedia guide.  It’s something that can guide you to objects and something you can use to help guide others, but it’s not meant to replicate the actual experience of really looking at the work, so I’m hoping this reduces the screen glue. As with everything, only time will really tell the outcome, but it’s worth a try.

In areas like The Dinner Party and Luce Visible Storage, suddenly you have a whole kiosk’s worth of information at your fingertips…right there in the space when you need, it in an unobtrusive way.

There’s even more after the jump if you are curious. (more…)

One of the questions we often get about 1stfans is whether it is our “young members” group. Most NYC Museums have “young patrons” groups targeted towards people aged 21-40, with annual dues ranging from $100 to $1000. The idea behind these groups is that young people, especially in NYC, strongly value the social aspects of membership and also like meeting other young people. By creating special groups dedicated to serving those social needs of a specific age group, Museums are able to cultivate the “next generation” of annual donors. From the Member’s perspective, groups like these provide an opportunity to mingle with social peers who also have an interest in art. These groups, some of which began as a way for museums to engage the children of Trustees and major donors, are, by most accounts, very successful today.

Though traditional young patrons groups share similar motivations and goals with 1stfans, let me explain why the parameters for 1stfans are different.  One major reason Shelley and I started 1stfans was to provide a membership structure that appealed to two specific segments of our community: Target First Saturday visitors and online followers. Because both those groups are filled with people of all ages, it didn’t make sense for us to limit 1stfans membership to anyone within a specific age range. Though we have to rely on news stories to tell us that people who use social media aren’t just young folks in their 20s and 30s, we’re able to see with our own eyes (take a look at the picture above) just how diverse in age our 1stfans are who attend the monthly Target First Saturday meetups. Yes, there are plenty of young people in 1stfans, but I consider that more a reflection of our general visitorship (one of the youngest and most diverse in the country) than of a specific effort on our part to make 1stfans appealing for a younger crowd.

And that’s the main difference between 1stfans and other young patrons groups: the goal of 1stfans is to make our membership base reflect our audience as a whole, and with young patrons groups the goal is to attract a very small subset of folks within a certain age and income demographic. Both efforts are critical to securing the future of museum membership; we as institutions just go about it in different ways. For many 1stfans, their $20 membership is the first membership they’ve ever had at any museum. In those cases, 1stfans is their introduction to the concept of museum membership, and we realize that for many people both locally and far-away, Brooklyn Museum membership—like the Museum itself—should be about access and opportunity for as many people as possible, which means no age restrictions.

Over the last year Will and I have been taking a closer look at the benefits we offer our Members so that each one is not only meaningful, but also relevant to the way in which Members interact with the Museum.  Instead of cutting back in these tough times, we came up with a whole new set of benefits for Members for the 2010 fiscal year (July 2009-June 2010) tailored to these interests.

As we began to add these benefits, it became apparent that our signature publication—the Membership brochure—was in need of a major update. Rather than simply adding the new benefits to the existing brochure, we took this opportunity to completely redesign this publication. After all, the Membership brochure is our primary means of communicating what a Membership offers, and why it’s important, to anyone who walks into the Museum.

As we tackled the new design of the brochure, we had three things in mind: it should be aesthetically appealing, as comprehensive as possible, and convenient for anyone deciding to join.  So I sat down with Caroline, the Museum’s extremely talented (and patient) Senior Print Designer, and we brainstormed how to best accomplish these objectives. Here are the major changes that we came up with:

First, we decided to revamp the brochure’s cover. We said goodbye to Georgia O’Keefe’s Brooklyn Bridge, which was on the cover of the old brochure, and said hello to an eye-catching compilation of images from the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collections. You may have noticed this design in various other Membership materials, like our Web page or the monthly Membership e-newsletter, so it only seemed fitting that this should also be the face of our Membership brochure.

New look on the right, with the older version on the left.

From there, our most important concern was that the benefit information clearly unfold (pun intended) on the inside.  We added more pages so the entire list of benefits would fit, made the text easier to read by incorporating a lighter color background, and we even decided to print the brochure on heavier paper stock so it would carry more weight (pun intended…again).

Finally, we took inspiration from the Studio Museum of Harlem’s membership brochure by including a perforated membership application that can be sealed and mailed back to us in a self-envelope.  We went one step further, however, by making the envelope prepaid so Members can return it to the Museum at their convenience.

Pre-paid, detachable envelope!

After many months of collaborating on this project, I’m positive that I not only owe Caroline the largest chocolate bar on the planet, but also that we successfully achieved our goals: we added value to our Memberships with an increased number of meaningful benefits, and we’re presenting them in a better package.  So next time you stop by the Visitor Center, grab a brochure and take look inside!

A couple of weeks ago, I discussed the issue of technology in museums and asked if tech engages or distracts.  The post mainly served to open the question and the responses we received from visitors and museum colleagues were quite varied.  I wanted to open the floor to another question…this time looking at a more specific example of computer kiosks in art museums.  I’m going to dive in with our own examples at Brooklyn to talk about some of my frustrations, ask some questions and think about when these really work and when they don’t.

I’ll start off with what we consider a win example—our comment kiosks.  Throughout the museum, we replaced the paper comment books with electronic kiosks.  The interface is not that fun or user-friendly, but it’s simple and many visitors use them to give us their feedback.   These have been fairly positive for us.  They allow us to see visitor feedback in real-time,  they are easier to maintain since we don’t have to replace pens/books, and the comments are available via the web, so anyone can view the visitor response.  We actively monitor the incoming feedback and, in some cases, have made adjustments based on the comments to improve the visitor experience.  We are working through some issues now to make the kiosks more visitor friendly—softer and less noisy keyboards, height adjustments, easier controls to page through on the touch screens—for the most part they work pretty well and we’ve been told by our visitors that they appreciate the opportunity to be heard.

Next up, let’s look at what might be considered lose example and, wow, does this make me cringe.  I’m sure many of our readers have seen the put-the-whole-website-on-the-kiosk-in-some-central-location example in some museum somewhere?   We are guilty of the “whole-website” kiosk—in our Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art we have two computers in a study area that essentially display the EASCFA website.    I rarely see people using them and when I do, they are not sitting for long and I have to wonder if visitors are getting anything out of it at all.   I’ve been discussing all this with the Center’s curator, Catherine Morris, and we’d both like to hear your thoughts on the issue as we discuss possible changes.  While we don’t have a lot of time or budget for an overhaul, we are tossing around the idea of displaying the Feminist Art Base, instead of the entire EASCFA site with the thought that perhaps more directed content might compliment the exhibitions and the artists in the Center a bit better.  I’ll throw these questions out there: Why would you take space in a museum to show off your web site?  Has anyone seen this work well?  Is this kind of thing helpful at all?

We’ve definitely got a couple of examples of draw hanging around.  In both the Luce Visible Storage area and The Dinner Party installation, there are kiosks that display more information about the works on view.  In both installations, we can’t display information about the works alongside the objects, so we use computer kiosks to provide the additional information on demand. The content on these kiosks is actually quite useful (I’d actually go so far to say essential), but both have issues that can make the experience of using them a frustrating one.  Let’s take a look at the Luce Visible Storage kiosks first:

Visible Storage is just that, a working storage room that is open to the public with as many as 2000 objects on display. Objects are identified with their accession number… that’s a pretty long number starting with the two or four year date of acquisition…47.203.16 is a pretty typical example of an accession number.  Although, there are six kiosks evenly spaced throughout the center, it’s pretty difficult to remember the numbers of the things you’d like to look up.  We do provide pencils and paper to make this a bit easier, so those provisions help a bit.  When you get to the stations, you’ve probably forgotten the number if you didn’t write it down.  Interestingly, we all knew this was going to be an issue and in the original spec for the Visible Storage we were going to loan visitors the Dell Axim so they could do look up objects on the go, but we couldn’t figure out how to check them out without frustration.  With no budget to hire a staffer to loan them out when visitors arrived at the fifth floor installation, the thought of people having to turn around and go back to the front desk to get one seemed problematic.  If a visitor happened to get one in the lobby, they’d have to tote it through their entire visit only to use it in that one area.  Just re-visiting this history to write this post makes me bonkers and we tabled it knowing that kiosks in the general proximity with pencil/paper was going to be the clearest solution at the time.

In The Dinner Party, the kiosks are outside the physical installation space.  This may seem odd, but these have been installed in the area where Judy Chicago’s Heritage Panels reside for a very specific reason.  The progression follows the artist’s intent and is designed so the visitor has a singular experience with the table/floor, then moves out into the research area where the Heritage Panels (and kiosks) are available for reference. Luckily, the kiosks are just one level of interpretation—we’ve also got a cell phone tour and small booklets that can be used in the installation area unobtrusively.  On a recent visit, I remember walking through The Dinner Party with my mother as she started to rattle off details about all the women at the table—that’s what you get for having a history teacher for a mom—she could talk background on all but two of the 39 women featured.  We had forgotten to pick up the booklet, didn’t have our phones and by the time we exited the installation and walked over to the kiosk, neither one of us could remember which of the 39 she didn’t know about and we didn’t want to stick around at the computer to try and figure it out.  The kiosk had really valuable information, but it was too far out of reach the moment we need it.

In terms of these two draw examples,  we’ve got a mobile solution coming next week that should help alleviate these issues for some visitors and place these examples into more of a win category.  In the meantime, I’d love to know your thoughts about kiosks in art museums.  This link sent to me via Nina Simon was some entertaining, head bobbing in agreement, not to be missed reading.  Let’s hear it…seen anything really awesome or really annoying that you’d like to share?