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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…)

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?

If you read the blog, you know we talk about our web initiatives all the time, but we rarely discuss the work we do on internal projects.  The web side of the Technology Department is charged with developing the stuff you see—both the website and the gallery technology—and the stuff you don’t like internal applications that can assist Brooklyn Museum staff and their daily workflow.  Normally we don’t blog about these internal applications, but this seems interesting enough that wanted to give it a quick run down.

Elaine Komorowski. Art Handlers, Brooklyn Museum, 2006. Oil on wood.

Many of our readers who’ve seen our behind the scenes sets of various exhibitions loading in have come to catch a glimpse of our fabulous team of Art Handlers and the type of work they do here on a daily basis.  The handlers are always out and about working in the galleries and the storerooms to ensure that art is moved safely throughout the building. In contrast to other staffers at the museum, they don’t have stationary desks with workstations, so we really needed to provide a solution for their computing needs that was more appropriate to their situation.

Elaine and Jason looking over their new work tool, the iPod Touch with Artsee.

ArtSee is a web app formatted for the iPod Touch 3″ screen and it runs a mobile version of our collection management system that we designed specifically for the needs of our Art Handlers.  Each member of the art handling staff has been given an iPod Touch so they can go into storage or the galleries and query an object’s location and other information. Lucky for us, Apple started supporting Exchange on these devices, so Art Handlers have easy access to Brooklyn Museum e-mail and are now in the pilot stages of e-mailing location reports back to the Collection Management team as objects are moved throughout the building.   In addition, Registrars are now using iPod Touches for web and e-mail access during courier trips and small things like currency conversion apps can sure make their life a bit easier on the road.  Registrars are also now utilizing mobile battery-operated printers to help them photograph objects and print records for condition reports as works arrive on site.

As it turns out, the solution came about from a confluence of events.  First, since 2002 we’ve had a wifi network running throughout the museum.  The wifi network was established for free public use, but we always had an eye toward utilizing it for staff and had wired up the storage spaces and the mechanical rooms at the same time we did the public galleries.  Second, the iPod Touch became pretty near to a fully-functional and affordable computing platform.  Last but not least, we put the collection online and that involved working with our database-driven business systems (such as our collections database, digital asset management system, etc.) to move various sets of data around, so it could form the foundation of web applications like the online collection and internal applications such as ArtSee.  For all the tech heads out there, Paul Beaudoin, the programmer in charge of making all this data play nicely together, has put together some nice documentation about how all this data moving works behind the scenes.  It’s in a wiki for the curious, so e-mail us for an invite.

We are still in the early stages, but are hearing good things so far.  You just can’t underestimate the smiling, giddy faces on the Tech team when someone says, “It changed the way I work for the better!”  Yay!

If anyone needed convincing that an API might be a good idea, this news might just do it for you.  A few weeks ago, we approved an API key for Adam Shackelford, a Brooklyn-based developer, to create an iPhone app.

We couldn’t have been more thrilled when Adam contacted us to say he was working on this.  It’s the kind of thing we couldn’t do with our existing workload and quickly realized the API was allowing us to do more by collaborating with the developer community.   Before you run off to the app store for this free download, we’ll mention it’s a few weeks off from being listed.  Adam came over for a site visit to show us his just-finished version 1.0 before he submits it to Apple for inclusion in the store.  We’ll be sure to blog when the app is ready, but in the meantime we wanted to share this Q&A, so you can meet Adam.

This will be the first in an ongoing series of Q&As with developers using the Brooklyn Museum API.  If you are curious about our own internal process to create the API, check out the interview Paul and I did for Mike Ellis on his blog. Additionally, you can chart developer progress in our new Application Gallery and find out about our latest additions in the News section (note, there’s an RSS feed to keep you up-to-date).

Site visit!  Paul Beaudoin (left) and Mike Dillon (center) check out Adam Shackelford’s (right) iPhone app version 1.0.

How did you hear about the Brooklyn Museum API?

One of my friends is increasingly involved in museum 2.0 (or 3.0?) emergence, and given the adoption of mobile technology in museums, we often talk about the intersection of our fields. She pointed out the API to me one day, and I thought to myself that someone surely was working on an iPhone application already. As it turned out, no one was, and so I built the app with the time I could find over the course of the last couple weeks.

Tell us about the app you’ve created, thought process behind it, etc?

In my mind, there are few things that inspire people to learn like museums and the web do. They seem like natural companions, and yet often this is not the case. Then along comes the iPhone, which has thus far created countless geeks out of otherwise normal people. Once I saw what the API allowed, it seemed like an opportunity to create something that people would enjoy. The key to invention in this field is to build things that people don’t realize they will use. I have only found one other museum application in the App Store, and it was something like 400 megabytes of space, composed of static elements, so we wanted to do something different. The app is entirely driven by the API, so it is always updated with museum content, and you are always connected to the museum in a very concrete way that was not technically possible before, and isn’t possible yet with any other museum in the world.

If there’s one thing you’d really like to do in version 2, what would it be?

Version 1.0 is being submitted to Apple very soon, and it is really only a foundation of everything we want to do with the application. Because all the content is pulled from the API, it is a very lightweight app that will be convenient for users to update. When the iPhone 3.0 OS goes public in June, we are planning a much more exciting geotagging experience, because the built-in mapping is making a great leap forward. Also we are interested in allowing users to tag items in the collection, expand the browsing options, etc. The main point I want to emphasize is that this is only the beginning, and we are planning to expand the application as the API evolves.

You mentioned this app was designed to scale, so that if other institutions release an API (hint, hint) you can grow the app. Tell us a bit about that?

Version 1.0 is largely just a demonstration. I could spend months refining it before its initial release, but as I said it is a very light app that can be easily updated, and the architecture is designed so that we can add or take away as needed for this or any comparable application. Indeed, we are hoping that this serves as a proof of concept and encourages other institutions to open up their collection to developers and thus the public. I also think that the iPhone can play a bigger role when people are actually visiting the museum, and I have some more elaborate ideas to develop someday. We are of course also interested in being hired by museums to assist with this.

We see from your website that you run an interactive media firm based in Brooklyn (!) - tell us a bit about your background and your company.

The company was started in January 2009 by myself and Katy Walker, our creative director, and Angela Chumley, our chief of operations and information architect. All three of us have worked primarily in advertising and corporate design firms, but agreed that it was time for a big change. We are all creative and passionate about our work, and bring diverse skills to the table, and a healthy amount of conflict and disagreement as well. We started Iconoclash Media because while we do enjoy making other peoples’ visions become reality, we also have our own ideas which we pursue together. The museum app is one example, but we divide our time between contracted client work and the development of original applications and have found that each aspect of our business influences the other.

So, you live in Brooklyn and have probably been to the Museum a few times…. Any favorite exhibitions, objects or events that come to mind?

I marvel at the geometric ingenuity of Islamic textiles, text, and ceramics, and Brooklyn Museum has a good amount of these. I’m also very interested in Japanese art, but I’m going to stop myself here before I list everything at the museum. One feature we built in the app is the ability to browse items totally at random, so I’ve been spending some time cycling through the 20,000+ items in the API, but many of those I have not yet seen in person. And there’s still no substitute for actually going to the museum.

So, the idea was pretty simple: the curators of Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection wanted our visitors to hear directly from the artists in the exhibition, so we set out to create a series of videos that would play on iPod Touches in the gallery. As most people reading this blog already know, we don’t have a lot of resources here (read: staff time) to produce video, so we needed a way to do this project without putting too much of a strain on the department. We purchased a bunch of Flip Video cameras and the curators set out to film short interviews with the artists—check these out. We were impressed with the quality of these cams, so if you are looking for a cheap and easy way shoot some video this may be a good answer for your needs—worked for us!

The iPod Touch part of the project turned out to be a bigger problem. Why iPods? Well, they are cheap and small. We are all conscious around here that too much technology can compete with the work on view and the Touches were a good fit. Small enough to be installed in a way that does not overpower the visitor experience, yet large enough screens to watch the movies and built-in touch screens to navigate a list of movie files.

iPod Touch installed in Burning Down the House seen here with Marriage Bed, 2001. Edwina Sandys (British, b. 1938). Mixed media. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Henry Luce III and Leila Hadley Luce, 2004.29.

We were hoping to find a Museum Mode that would work for the Touch, but it doesn’t exist yet. I guess this makes sense, it took Apple a really long time to release Museum Mode the first time around and it looks like we may be waiting just as long for a version to run on this newer hardware. Best answer we could find was to use the API to create an app, but that doesn’t work either—the API won’t let you lock down the device in a kiosk-like way. No Museum Mode? No API? What’s a museum tech department to do? Our solution is not perfect, but it’s not difficult to accomplish and if you drop us a line we can point you to some existing documentation on the web that helped us.

Now that we’ve got them in the gallery, we will be watching usability closely. Apple is pretty good about providing easy-to-use interfaces, but it remains to be seen how it will translate in a situation like this one. We’ve got a fabulous team of security guards to help get feedback. I’ll be doing some of my own observation in the galleries and will report back with our findings.