Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

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?

This is a follow-up report to my earlier post about utilizing YouTube Quick Capture to create a community voices component for The Black List Project.  The exhibition closed yesterday, so the time seemed right to post an analysis of the experiment.

black list by neenna via Flickr.  All Rights Reserved.

Stats

Let’s take a look at the basic statistics.  During the show’s four month run, visitors recorded 482 videos, 236 of which made it to our Black List Project YouTube channel.  Of the 236 that were published on the channel, 96 made it to the Brooklyn Museum favorites playlist.  We had 43,386 video views overall, but keep in mind one video (recorded by one of our security guards) was seen over 23,000 times when it was featured on YouTube during MLK day. Also, the channel was given non-profit status at YouTube which means auto-play is activated for videos featured on our channel and this will raise the view count.

Moderation

The project required a sizable amount of moderation.  Videos went live throughout the day and were post-moderated in the evenings.  Depending on how many videos were recorded, moderation took between 5-15 minutes per day.  When we had higher volume at Target First Saturday, we’d see anywhere between 40-80 videos recorded and this moderation required an hour or two. Interestingly, we received some of our best comments during Target First Saturday and the ratio on those days was much more signal than noise, so even in the volume, it felt worth it. Moderated videos fell into three areas and I’ve left a few of these live so you can get a chuckle:  1) kids goofing off 2) adults goofing off 3) people who would press record and walk away.  There were also more than a few instances of will our hardware make it out of this experiment alive!!??! Only one video was removed because it violated our comment guidelines. Typically, we don’t moderate this heavily, but on this particular project we decided to do so because wading through video content to get to decent recordings is a lot more difficult than scanning text comments for gold.  As someone who did almost all of the moderation on the project, I can tell you it’s a time-consuming process and not one that I’d want to put our web visitors through.  We toyed with the idea of letting the community moderate itself at YouTube (ratings were left on), but we ran into issues there.   For starters, we didn’t have enough traffic to the channel to generate enough ratings on all the videos.  You can see what happens when you look at most viewed.  Some videos were seen a lot (due in part to our featuring the videos in different ways) and others were not seen much at all—had we left all the content, I have a feeling the view numbers would have plummeted out of sheer viewer frustration.

We ran into one significant issue along the way and this is something I was prepared for in my head, but perhaps not in reality.  I was surprised by how many members of the community were sharing racist statements at YouTube (we have never had this problem on other platforms). *wow* can only describe some of the comments that were deleted because they were in such clear violation our comment guidelines.  Only one video was deleted due to a violation in guidelines, but the opposite was true on YouTube, where in my entire career, I have never deleted more comments or blocked so many users. We have a very high threshold, so just know this problem was significant.  There was something about the subject matter of the show, what we were asking and how people were responding, combined with this particular on-line community that generated a lot of issues in this arena.  Now that the show has closed, we will go in and turn off comments on every video and that’s a first for us.

Technical Issues

We had a some technical trouble (crashing, sound mismatches, pixelated capture) in the early videos. We 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 infrastructure where you can tweak a bit if you are seeing problems.  I would not try this over a wifi connection.  We also found lights were needed and we grabbed those at Ikea for very little money.

Archiving 

I don’t have a great answer for this.  Because the videos are uploaded directly to YouTube, archiving them becomes a manual process where we use free tools to download the files back to our systems.  This is a time-consuming process, so we will probably only do this for the ones that made our favorites list.  In addition, the channel and some of the videos with comments and ratings will be screenshot.  The channel itself will stay up for as long as it can be there—we have no plans to remove it.

Success? 

Yes, but there’s more we can do next time.  This was a very simple system which cost us very little in actual dollars.  As low-fi as it was, it worked well to provide something that we couldn’t have afforded otherwise. Staff time was needed for moderation, but other than the volume at Target First Saturday, the time needed to be accounted for, but was not overwhelming.  I will never forget seeing more than one visitor in tears when expressing themselves at these kiosks. Browse through these videos to get an idea of why this was so great.

Given the amount of moderation, I don’t think we’d use these often, but when we have a really important question we want to ask, it will be worth considering.  If I had to do it all over again, I’d make sure we had our favorites playing in the gallery alongside the recording area, so people could get inspired by what others had to say—closing the loop and bringing the voices back into the gallery. For the record, our Education Department was advocating this from the start, but given the time constraints we were under, we couldn’t make this part of the first round.  Nina Simon also has some good reasons for it here that you may want to read.  In a future instance, we’d ideally leverage the YouTube API to allow people in the gallery to comment on and rate the existing videos, but that’s a pretty large project for another day.  For now, we were happy with and learned a lot from this first try.

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

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.