Answered questions appear on a second screen near the iPad where questions are asked. This one is installed on a column in our Connecting Cultures exhibition.

At first we considered using two iPads: one to ask questions, the other to view the answers. However, we felt that the way that answers were presented needed not only to be visually compelling, but had to stand apart from (or perhaps even in opposition to) the ASK kiosk. Further, we had to be able properly lock down these devices to not only protect them from a overly curious user, but to ensure that any visitor to the museum can have the full experience without accidentally breaking a piece of it.

We went with the HP ProOne 400.

In the end we decided to use an All-In-One PC running Windows 8; specifically the HP ProOne 400. With a 23in widescreen monitor it stood in an appropriate contrast to the iPads. Also, given that it runs Windows 8 we could count of a host of software vendors to help us secure each device, if not our in-house expertise. This particular model is also VESA compatible (a surprisingly rare feature for All-In-Ones) allowing us to select from of a variety of wall mounts upon which to hang our soon to be Answer Kiosks.

Confident in our selection we purchased seven shiny new HP ProOne 400s and began the process of securing the first among them. This was the part of the onion peeling process where my eyes began to tear, and wouldn’t stop for several days.

Despite considerable research we could not find a vendor that provided kiosk software that could secure the devices in the way we needed. Although each effectively restricted the computer to the webpage, some injected their logos onto the page, while others allowed gestures that would complicate the experience. Disheartened, I resolved to lock it down using the settings and commands within Windows.

The Answer webpage was designed to work optimally with Google Chrome, which, if run from the command line with the “–kiosk” switch will present a web page in full screen and prevent someone from closing Chrome or opening a new program from the Start Screen. Later, while trying to find ways of breaking, or breaking into my setup I decided to add the following switches: –incognito (to suppress webpage restore options in the event that Chrome shutdown unexpectedly), and–disable-pinch (to disable pinch-to-zoom because Chrome enables this feature by default even if it is disabled in Windows).

Chrome’s configurations, however, were insufficient to secure these touch screen devices because of Windows 8’s edge gestures. If you swipe a finger inward from an edge on a touch screen computer running Windows 8 it will present menus that allow you to change the PCs settings, switch apps, or even shut the PC down—none of which would be conducive to the ASK experience. This one feature was also left unaddressed by the majority of the software vendors I researched earlier, forcing me to turn them down.

Fortunately, I was not the only citizen of the internet who had faced this dilemma and I was able to find a tech support forum post wherein another Network Admin explained that the edge swipe feature relied on explorer.exe, and could be “disabled” if you end the explorer.exe process. Of course, by doing so one closes the entire Windows experience—the start menu, task bar, and programs (most importantly the Answer webpage itself) all disappear from view, and remain as such until you re-run explorer.exe… the layers of the onion (and the tears) just kept on coming.

After some experimenting, I found that by running a short script that first disabled explorer.exe then ran Chrome with all my desired switches I could successfully present the Answer webpage in all its glory without leaving any prompts, buttons, or gestures that would complicate this for the user. Next I set this script to run on start up, so that when the PC is powered on it will automatically bring up and lock down the webpage. For the curious that script is as follows:

taskkill /IM explorer.exe /f

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –kiosk http://brooklynmuseum.org/ask/forum/responses.php?forum=28&” –incognito, –disable-pinch

Having stripped away that issue I went about unraveling the finer details. This included preventing the PC from going to sleep, disabling the card reader and Auto-Play to keep anyone from installing malicious software, setting it to run on an isolated wireless network, and having all of this run from a restricted account, which would automatically login upon startup.

To protect against power outages (whether accidental or otherwise) I configured the BIOS (a computer’s internal hardware settings) to automatically power on if power is lost then restored, and disabled the automated Startup Repair feature that normally runs if the PC isn’t shut down properly. At this point, to do anything in the PC other than view the Answer page one would need to plug in a keyboard directly into one of the PCs in an exhibition, which will be promptly stopped by museum security… something I experienced myself when was setting up one of the devices without my ID about my neck. I would like to note that discovering an angry cloud of grey and blue gathering behind me as I clacked away on my presumably contraband keyboard was my least favorite but most reassuring experience in this piece of the project, but I digress.

One would think that after all this every angle was covered, but a final nearly-overlooked detail arose in the 11th hour. Many of our answers include videos from YouTube, whose players we embed into the answer pages. These players include a “YouTube” button that links over to YouTube.com\/watch when tapped. If a user were to do so, given all the settings I described above, there would be no way of getting back to the answer page without power cycling the PC. For this, David Huerta and Christina White, our Head of IT, worked together to select a Chrome plugin aptly named “Redirector” which redirects any attempt to go to Youtube.com\/watch back to our answer page, effectively turning that link into a simple refresh button.

With that the Answer experience was fully secured, and the PCs mounted in their associated exhibitions. The process was documented to make future deployments easier, and an image backup was captured of each machine individually using Clonezilla. We would have used a managed imaging software like Symantec Ghost to deploy the settings to each device at once, but the complications between Symantec, Windows 8’s licensing mechanisms, and HP’s hardware make up the layers of another onion that is best left for another day.

Metrics can tell a story, but they are often not enough.

One of our windows into visitor behavior is metrics. In the case of our ipad kiosks, up until now at least, this is a pretty small window. The metrics we were able to gather were limited to Google Analytic tracking and YouTube’s own analytics package. Taking last season’s Ai Weiwei and Swoon kiosks as an example, we know how many questions were asked and how many times someone pressed play on the video prompt or the response videos. What we don’t know is if a person was pressing play in the gallery or online because the videos were hosted on YouTube and then embedded into the ASK interface. In addition to being shown in the gallery on the iPad, the video prompt and responses are also available on the exhibition’s webpage. YouTube statistics tell us how many times a video was watched, but we don’t know if this is an online on in-gallery viewing. And of course metrics also can’t tell us how many videos one person may have watched or if the people posing questions are the same as those reviewing answers.

Observation showed us that visitors often use the kiosks in social groups.

To begin to get answers to these questions, our Digital Community Liaison, Brooke Baldeschwiler, spent time in the galleries observing and speaking with visitors in the Ai Weiwei and Swoon exhibitions. From this, we were able to determine that there are two fairly distinct user groups—the question posers and the response reviewers. In fact, observation was showing us that most visitors used the kiosks to review answers. Reasons for this varied and included not having time, not having a question, or seeing the answer to their question already posted. Brooke also determined that multiple visitors use the kiosks at once. This falls right in line with visitor behavior in general; we have a social bunch here (most of our visitors come in pairs and small groups) and they like to experience the museum together. Looking at these stats and their limitations and armed with a better understanding of use through observation and interviews, we have updated our approach for the ASK kiosks this exhibition season in a number of key ways.

The iPads remain the place to pose your question, but we’ve added a companion touchscreen that will show the answered questions.

First, we divided the experience into ask and answers. The iPads remain the place to pose your question, but we’ve added a companion touchscreen that will show the answered questions. This not only caters to the two user groups and social use we’ve identified through observation, but also allows us to get more specific metrics because the new design allows us the ability to track when an answer is read.  We can now get a greater sense of the overall participation from askers to readers. Additionally, putting the answers on a larger screen is a very preliminary form of prototyping for future digital signage, which we plan to eventually deploy as part of this project. We’re not really sure what kinds of content will encourage people to approach and touch and this will give us some early insight into those motivations. We’ll be showing answers in both video and text format and can begin to see what visuals and what content draw people in.

In our new setup the ipad is where you ask your question, but we’ve paired with a larger touchscreen which displays the answers.

This season we’re also tracking the play button so we’ll be able to see how many people watch the videos and if that play button was pressed in-gallery or online. We’ll be able to see how much of each video they watch, which will help us get a feel for good video length. Of course, we’ll still be tracking how many people leave questions and be able to compare that to the number of people watching the video, so we’ll know how many answered our call to action.

Observation has shown us that those who ask and those who read are different audiences; the larger screen of answers helps facilitate the readers.

However, metrics still won’t tell us who is pressing play. We’ll be doing more observation to learn that. Observation will also give us an idea of the stay rate at the kiosks, how much content users delve into, and what general user experience is like. Is the function of each component (iPad and touchscreen) clear? Easy to navigate? Is the content compelling? We’ll also do some interviews to help answer those questions. That’s really one of my personal key learnings from this project—to get the real story, you have to pair metrics with observation and audience evaluation. We’ll continue to use both as the project unfolds.

For our spring 2014 exhibitions, ipad kiosks started with a video call to action under the heading, “In Conversation.”

One example of this is our comment book kiosks, which you may remember started as generic electronic versions of comment books and then were tweaked into “In Conversation” kiosks—all running on ipads throughout our exhibitions.  When we switched to the newer conversational format, the big change was a video call to action on the start screen.  Nicely, the video format meant we could do anything in that initial call, so we started our experiment with content. As part of our spring 2014 exhibitions, we shifted the focus of those videos to “ask us a question” and both of our featured artists, Swoon and Ai Weiwei, answered visitor questions that were left on the ipads.

In our latest pilot, the same ipads have a re-branded start screen to match our ASK program for Bloomberg Connects.

For fall, we are continuing the “ask us a question” format, but we are extending it into certain areas of the permanent collection and, additionally, changing the design of the start screen to reflect the greater ASK program.  The bonus?  If this works, it can provide us with a way to make ASK functionality available to those who do not have (or do not want to use) a mobile device. Given these kiosks may become part of the greater Bloomberg Connects program we are thinking about a lot of issues as we move through this pilot.

At first glance, this seems easy, right?  Change the start screen and the call to action and done(!), but there’s a lot more nuance that goes into a change like this one. Unlike our future mobile setup, these kiosks don’t operate in real time; the visitor gets their response via email after their visit, so we need to think about messaging and visitor expectations.  Additionally, not everyone who leaves a question on one of these kiosks receives an answer—not the case in mobile.

There’s a big difference in responses given depending on if the device is fixed vs. mobile.

We are also thinking a lot about differences in contributed content and how different an “ask” can be from a fixed device to a mobile one. These ipads are in a fixed position in the galleries, so the questions that we get through them are slightly different. So far, we’ve seen questions from the kiosks either more general in nature—about the overall themes in the show and/or about works of art installed very near where the kiosk is mounted. Testing on mobile has, so far, seen questions that tend to be much more specific and granular—about single works of art and about any work of art in the gallery because the device goes with the user.  Does the resulting content from two slightly different iterations mesh together well enough?

From an administrative perspective—vetting questions, providing responses, managing users—we wonder if this system needs to be integrated into the ASK management and, if so, what that would look like.  There are benefits to integration because it could help a single dedicated staff manage all ask/answer content in the building using a single administrative setup, but there’s a large technical overhead in merging the two systems.

So, there’s a lot of complexity and this pilot is an important one because it allows us to tweak an existing setup and learn from it before we build and/or combine programs. Sara is up next to talk about some additional changes we are making to these kiosks based on visitor observation in those spring exhibitions.

For the most part these worked to serve the purpose and we didn’t think much about changing them, but this year we started to wonder if there would be value in upping the game a bit. As they stood, they were the electronic version of a one way comment drop box.  Should they become a more personal experience and one that leans toward a two way dialog? Could we elevate the discussion from a simple “leave us your thoughts” to more directed questions that might provoke deeper engagement?  Could that same format help give visitors access to someone—a curator, an educator, an artist, a conservator—to help get their questions answered?

An iPad in LaToya Ruby Frazier uses a video prompt of the artist asking visitors for their questions.

Starting with a recent crop of exhibitions—GO, El Anatsui, Sargent, LaToya Ruby Frazier—Sara and I worked with curators and educators to begin experimenting with the format and comment kiosks were transformed into a more dynamic experience by using video to ask visitors directed questions and put a more personal spin on these devices.  LaToya Ruby Frazier says “no question is too big or too small,” while Radiah Harper asks how El Anatsui has “left a charge on you.”  Comments are threaded, have a popularity ranking (“I have this question, too”), and email a visitor when a response is posted to their query.  Just as before, appropriate staff are emailed digests and comments and conversations sit on the appropriate exhibition pages of our website.

Pause Play Play Prev | Next

The responses from visitors have been thoughtful and insightful; the questions we are seeing asked when we give access to an artist or conservator have been inspiring.  Sara and I estimate that we’ve gone from a ratio of 30% of insightful comments on the older kiosks to a 70% rate on the new ones; there’s been a lot of dramatic change as a result of just thinking (and designing) these a little differently.  Comments now go very far beyond the  “awesome exhibition” that we were seeing in the older stations.

Right now, you have the unique opportunity to see both the older kiosks and the new in place throughout the building because we are just starting to work with curators to figure out how this new format might serve our permanent collections as we evaluate these current changes.  Sara has implemented a visitor experience study around them and we’ve got a lot of metrics to eventually share, so look for a future post from her about even more specifics.

This is a first step in re-thinking about responsiveness and our visitors will likely be seeing a lot of tweaks and improvements to these new comment stations as we move forward.

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.

Logistics:

Why a web app?  We wanted to develop something that could be utilized on as many devices as possible.  Now, that means we can’t do some fancy bells and whistles…like integration with iPhone cams, etc., but we believe accessibility is paramount.

Why room codes?  We went with short codes instead of something like QR codes because I pine for the day that QR codes become truly easy to use.  Different cell phone cameras trying to capture QR codes in low light = one heck of a mess.  We are going for the most universal method, the simplest way to get visitors the information.

What’s to prevent a cascade? We’ve got lots of Wisdom of Crowds randomization built into the output to avoid it.

Why can’t I comment on objects and create sets on the fly during my visit?  That may be coming in version 2, but for now we wanted to be conscious that typing on these little device keyboards can be a frustrating and painful experience.  As it stands, the interface is almost all touch-and-go with as little typing needed as possible and the expectation is this will lowers the barrier to entry and allows the app to be more easily used.

Considerations:

At the moment, we are relying on visitors to bring their own hardware and we don’t how many of our visitors have these devices or want an experience like this. We will be watching usage closely, but also will be monitoring how many visitors come to the front desk to ask if we have units available.   For now, this is a starting point and as we learn more we will be considering if checkout at the front desk is necessary option that we need to provide.

What’s Next:

Eventually, the data gathered will power a recommendation system on our website.  This is something we’ve wanted to do for a while, but hesitated because objects present themselves so differently via the web.  We are hoping that data gathered in the gallery will be more true to the objects, so when we port this back to the website, the recommendations will be based on what visitors physically saw in the gallery rather than how objects are (mis)interpreted via the web.

As many readers know, we have an existing iPhone app that was developed using our API, so you might be wondering how these two things will co-exist.  Well, we think BklynMuse is something that works well in the building—everything is location specific, recommendations are something you give in the gallery while looking at objects.  The iPhone app works well outside of the building as a browser for our collection. Because the iPhone app is now open source, our internal team will be working to contribute code to combine the two things in the Fall. Ideally, when you download the iPhone app in the future, the home screen will present you with two choices “I’m in the building and want to explore.” or “I want to browse the collection away from the museum.” Based on the adventure you choose, the app will either bounce you to BklynMuse or you will be directed to the existing iPhone app.

Thank You:

For the first time since Click!, we did some extensive beta testing with some pretty amazing people willing to give their time to this project and this testing was essential.  We not only learned a lot from it, but it sparked some great ideas along the way and we wouldn’t be at this juncture without the help and dedication of: Mike, Rik, Lisa, Erin, MuseumNerd, Wesley, Mike, Matt & Kendall, Amy, Stephen, Ronnye & Fred, Farrah, Amy, Dave and Courtney.  Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to make this app even better.

If you got this far, you must want to give it a go?

We did extensive testing with mobile device browsers, but didn’t bother with desktop browsers, so you’ll have to humor us and use Firefox if you are testing via desktop instead of a mobile device.  Point your browser to m.brooklynmuseum.org and scale it down so the window is small.  If you need room codes you can find them on my Flickr (the codes are on labels in each gallery, I’m just giving you maps to be friendly).  If you are on the iPhone or iPod Touch, you can add the app to the homescreen after you hit it in mobile Safari.  Don’t forget to set your mood and have some fun!

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?

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.