Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

If you are a fan of the The Commons on Flickr and live in the NYC area, come to our Common Ground meetup this weekend to celebrate—we’ve got tons and tons of neato stuff to give away!  The folks from the NYPL are going to be joining us to meet and greet and answer questions about the fantastic images being uploaded to The Commons.  We’ll be running a really big slideshow curated by the Flickr community in the lobby, so come find us this Saturday October 3rd, 6-9:30 pm!  That’s smack dab in the middle of a fabulous opera-inspired Target First Saturday, so there will be lots to do here that evening.

Don’t forget, this is a global meetup, check out these other venues if you live closer to these areas:

Sydney, Australia. A bit jealous of our colleagues over at the Powerhouse Museum who have been making preparations all week for an outdoor slideshow on the facade of their building.  The Powerhouse peeps are teaming up with the State Library of New South Wales for a joint event.

Brisbane, Australia.  The State Library of Queensland is also presenting the slideshow outdoors on their Queensland Terrace—one of my personal favorite buildings in all of Australia is the Queensland Library, so that should be an amazing event in a great location!

Canberra, Australia.  The Australian War Memorial is also taking part with a projection in their orientation gallery.

Safety Harbor and Tallahassee, Florida.  The State Archives of Florida are running two events in the area.

Rochester, New York.  George Eastman House is hosting an event in their theatre and that means you can meet Ryan…he’s the one we have to thank for the slideshow because he did a ton of work programming the voting tool and the slideshow via the Flickr API.  Thanks, Ryan!

Corvalis, Oregon.  Don’t miss the photograph on this event listing—these Oregon peeps have a sense of Flickr-humor and we love them for it.

…but perhaps the Swedish National Heritage Board has us all beat!   They are hosting their event in the Medieval St. Karin Church ruin in central Visby on the island of Gotland, Sweden.  That very same church ruin is actually pictured in one of the photographs they’ve uploaded to The Commons.  It kind of doesn’t get more meta than that!

Coming to a meetup?  Tweet using the #CommonGround hashtag and if you upload photos to Flickr, tag them CommonGround2009 and we’d love to see them added to The Commons group.  Hope to meet you there!

Are you a fan of the materials being uploaded to the Flickr Commons?   Well, we are huge fans and that got a few of us wondering about a way to thank the community of people who’ve rallied around our materials by tagging, commenting, investigating and looking.   Paula Bray (Powerhouse) was thinking it was high time to take community favorites, do slideshows on our buildings and have a giant global meetup to celebrate! Sure sounded like a good idea to us, so save the date of October 2nd and 3rd—each institution will be posting more information about their hosted meetup as we get closer.  For our part, we are teaming up with the New York Public Library at Target First Saturday for a joint event—stay tuned.

In order for us to have a slideshow, we need your help.  Ryan Donahue at the George Eastman House created a way you can go and vote for which images you’d like to see during the meetup.   So, you’ve got until September 16th to tell us which of your favs should be in the slideshow.

More news via the Flickr blog or the Powerhouse and keep your eyes on this discussion topic on Flickr where we are making all the announcements.  We can’t wait to see you at the meetup!

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…)

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?

Did everyone catch Michael Kimmelman’s article in the New York Times yesterday?  CultureGrrl adding her own take to museum sprinting was pretty amusing reading, too and the discussion reminded me of a similar one that David Pogue mentioned back in March about his “to film or not to film” a singular event like the Space Shuttle launch.  If you’ve ever been to the Louvre, what Kimmelman mentions is not much of a surprise.  I was there ten years ago, way before the proliferation of digital and cell phone cameras, but the people watching was much the same.  Photos or not, people were bolting for certain objects and ignoring everything in their path along the way.  What fascinated me was not the article—by 9AM yesterday, I discovered the NYT had enabled reader comments and I was riveted.  If you have not checked those out yet, it’s worth the time to peruse those comments.

As a technologist, I wanted to take the opportunity to look at those comments and discuss the topic of technology in museums, pointing to a recent example of ours.  I’ll warn you, I tend to find technology in museums (art museums) rather distracting and I’m not often a fan of what I see implemented.  We do a lot of experiments here and I often find myself torn with the results.  You may remember that last year, we produced a series of videos and put them on iPod Touches in the gallery.  One idea behind this experiment was to produce the videos as lo-fi as possible with the hope that very little production value would encourage visitors to look at the works of art instead of the screens.  Rather than just produce audio tracks, we felt like seeing the artist talking would provide a more intimate experience, but by eliminating video-fanciness we were hoping visitors would get started by watching and then shift their attention to the work as they continued to listen.

I spent a lot of time watching people in the galleries and, in a very informal way, found that 80% of the time visitors were totally glued to those screens:

…by contrast, 20% of the time they were starting with the video, then shifting their attention to the work of art the artist was speaking about:

I’ve not blogged about this observation before now because I’ve had conflicted feelings about it.  On one hand, I wish I had seen more visitors engaging directly with the works, but on the other…I have to recognize that everyone will engage in different ways and that should be welcome.

I will say as we are getting ready to launch a new project, this idea of how to implement technology, so it promotes art viewing instead of TV watching has weighed heavily in my mind.  I’ll talk a bit more about this particular project in a few weeks as we get closer to release, but in the mean time, I’d love to know your thoughts on this issue.  For all the museum professionals and museum visitors who read this blog, there must be plenty of opinion out there?