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…)

As most of our readers know, we encourage tagging on our online collection and we created Tag! You’re It to make that contribution more fun and more relevant.  We’ve been surprised at the tagging that has taken place, how much of it is really excellent work and how committed some people have been to making our collection even more searchable.  In the ten months since our collection has gone online, we’ve seen 69,579 tags—3,815 system tags automatically extracted from our internal collection system, 58,107 contributed by members of our Posse and 7,657 created by anonymous users. By far, the best results have come from our Posse of logged in users—both in terms of quantity and quality (fewer than 1% of Posse-generated tags have been removed).  The auto-generated system tags are mostly OK, but they could use some human vetting. The tags generated by anonymous taggers can sometimes be a different story.

We designed our system to accept tags from users who might not want an account and that’s been both valuable and a bit of trouble.  On one hand, the 7,657 tags by anonymous contribution are nothing to sneeze at, but we’ve had to keep a close eye on those submissions and have deleted roughly 6% of them due to complete inaccuracy.  We could eliminate the capability to add tags anonymously, but 94% of those contributions are of great value and, more importantly we want our online collection to be welcoming to anyone with or without an account.  That said, there are plenty of people testing us just for fun and when the tags “how long will it take you to delete this tag” and “are you going to block me” showed up on the scene, there was only so long it was going to take an overworked Technology department to do something about it.  We knew the Brooklyn Museum Posse would have a lot to do with the solution.

The hunt for the Governor gang of bushrangers. A posse of mounted police, aboriginal trackers and district volunteers. Jimmy & Joe Governor were sighted at Stewarts Brook on 12 September 1900 - Stewarts Brook, NSW / by A C Jackson (via State Library of New South Wales on the Flickr Commons).

Today we are introducing a new game called Freeze Tag! which puts control of the tags back into the hands of our most valued community members.  If you are a member of our Posse, you can delete tags from object pages−this is new, previously we were not allowing tag deletion except by system admins. For any tag that is deleted, it takes another two pairs of Posse eyes to “agree” within Freeze Tag! before that tag’s fate is sealed.  On the other hand, if three Posse members within the game think the tag should be saved, it will be restored.  After a short stint on the live site, all tags created anonymously will automatically be “challenged” and moved into the game for vetting by Posse.  Freeze Tag! is designed with all that great Wisdom of Crowds mentality−influence is minimized by each Posse member coming to their own decision independently, then we aggregate into a collective decision to determine if a tag should stay or go.  After all, why should one person decide the worth of a tag, when a collective decision may be more accurate?  It will be interesting to see the results of this and we’ll report back as we see what happens.

To start Freeze Tag! off with a bang, we’ve populated it with all the anonymous tags to date and, in addition, thrown in all those auto-generated tags that need a bit of human review.  This may sound complicated, but I think when you play Freeze Tag!, you’ll agree that all the complicated goings on behind-the-scenes is bundled up in a pretty simple package that, we hope, is fun to play.  No spoilers or anything, but be on the lookout for cameos from our own on-site security posse.

Rock on, Posse—thank you for all your incredible work to date and we hope you continue to have fun with us as we move forward with our collection online!

One of the things we’ve gotten to know about our community is people often have specialized areas of interest.  In just one example, we’ve gotten to know Vincent Brown and his interest is in all things Egypt, so we started to think about our tagging game and adjustments we could make to enhance the experience for visitors who want to focus on certain types of objects.

So, today, we are introducing “Change My Settings.” From within Tag! You’re It!, you can now change your game preferences by selecting the areas of our collection that you’d like to see:

As Mike mentioned earlier, joining the Posse is now easier than ever with our Google account integration and we are excited enough about these enhancements, that Bob (along with a few willing participants) made us a really awesome video to celebrate.  Have fun tagging and many thanks for all your enthusiasm (50,000+ tags!!) thus far!

Chances are, if you’ve heard of the Internet, you’ve also heard of Google and chances are pretty good that you’ve set up an e-mail account with them as well. Personally, I’ve got three, and that doesn’t even take into account the e-mail I use with sites that are likely going to send me spam. Another big thing people privy to the Internet will have realized, is how annoying it is to sign up with all the different sites out there. So, since brooklynmuseum.org is exactly one of those sites, we thought we’d follow the great lead of our colleagues at artbabble.org and cut everyone some slack by allowing them to use their Google ID to sign up. This not only saves you from having to use your keyboard to type letters into 3 input fields and possibly think up an entirely new password, it also allows you to save precious neurons on something that’s actually important rather than having to remember your password for yet another site.

But wait! Before you start kicking yourself for signing up with us before we released this super-awesome feature, let me tell you this: we have carefully engineered a solution to your problem. If you login with your existing username and password, then navigate to your account page, you will see a link to transition your account to use Google ID.

Also, if for some reason you come to an impasse with Google and would like to start using another emails address and password to log into our site, you can easily transition to using any other account you choose.