Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Lessons learned post about the Visitor Video Competition for all the colleagues out there who might be thinking of doing something similar. (more…)

Just what are “interpretive materials”? I’m often asked this question and usually have a hard time reducing my answer to one or even five things, as interpretive materials change with time and vary from one exhibition to the next. For the purpose of brevity in this post, in a nutshell, they consist of exhibition didactics, labels, brochures/printed guides, audio tours, podcasts, and more. Notably, they also include our visitor comment books.

Comment book in traditional form in the Asian and Islamic Art galleries.

One of the many goals of interpretive materials at the Brooklyn Museum is to consider the various ways that people learn (e.g. through text, sound, drawing, sharing, etc), to offer new ways for our visitors to experience and engage with objects and to keep the older methods current/relevant. If you’ve visited our permanent collections in recent years you may have noticed some unique labels which offer responses to and interpretations by our visitors to specific works of art – we call these “Community Voices.”

Community Voices label from the Egypt Reborn: Art for Eternity permanent collection exhibition.

It’s important to me that in addition to these practices in the physical exhibition, that such object interpretation and, really, education progress alongside technology; in the age of web 2.0 learning is essentially communal. Earlier this year my colleague, Shelley Bernstein, and I decided to try something new, replacing paper comment books with electronic comment kiosks for our special exhibitions Global Feminisms and Kindred Spirits. The overwhelming participation and positive feedback, both in the galleries and through our online comment forum, made it a very successful initiative.

Electronic comment kiosk for the exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art

As Shelley mentioned in her last post, Let’s Hear It, we are rolling out a new version of comment kiosks for the exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art. Now visitors have the opportunity to not only share general comments about the exhibition (as earlier offered), but also to comment on specific objects. In this, the Brooklyn Museum mission and subsequent tradition of Community Voice labels continues (and evolves). We wait anxiously to hear your thoughts.

Screenshot from the Infinite Island comment kiosks.

In preparation for the opening of Infinite Island this Friday, we’ve just finished installing our comment kiosks. For this exhibition, we developed a couple of new components. Now, our visitors can give us general comments about the exhibition or specific comments about selected highlights. To give each comment greater visibility, we created an attract screen for the kiosk that selects comments at random and displays them with the appropriate work of art.

As always, comments can be submitted onsite using our comment kiosks or directly from the website. No matter where you leave them, all comments are visible on the website and in the gallery.

If you are coming to the exhibition, be sure to let us know what you think. Kiosks can be found on both the 4th and 5th floors near the stairwells.

Kiosk with custom casing installed in Luce Visible Storage.

Over the past several months, colleagues have been asking what kind of hardware is in use in our kiosk installations. After posting about the Firefox kiosk upgrade, hardware specifics seemed like it would be a good next post. If you are interested in this kind of thing… (more…)

If you’ve ever had to install a kiosk in a public place, you probably know how frustrating it can be. The interface has to be locked down as securely as possible, but the kiosk must still run the intended application and be as stable as possible. Beginning with the installation of the kiosks in our Egypt Reborn exhibition, I had become frustrated with the lack of options on the market — I just couldn’t find a kiosk software package that could do what we needed and work with a browser that we liked.

In 2004, we contracted Pete Collins over at Mozdev Group, Inc. to develop a kiosk package that would meet our needs. At the time, Firefox was still in beta, so we decided to use Mozilla as the base browser. I had come up with a list of requirements to solve issues we had already faced and included other features we knew we wanted. The idea was to develop it with a whole host of features and keep it flexible, so we could add more features as we needed them. Since community is a part of the Museum’s mission, it was important to us that we develop the product under the MPL, so it could be distributed for free and modified by anyone who wanted to use it.

With the latest round of kiosks going into the new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center of Feminist Art, we started to realize that Mozilla was showing its age. Firefox, now at version 2, was mature enough, so we started the process of porting the existing version so it could run on the latest browser. Pete and his team at Mozdev Group were contracted to do the port and now we have a bright and shiny new kiosk product that anyone can use.

Both the Mozilla version and the newer Firefox version can be downloaded at the Brooklyn Museum client page on Mozdev Group’s site.

Note: The port was a bit more difficult than we thought due to some structural changes in the Firefox security model. See the admin installation instructions to get the kiosk to install as admin, then run as a restricted user.