As a curator I have always wanted our visitors to have access to more information about the collection than is usually available. I’ve long been frustrated that the 100-word label provides only the briefest introduction to an object. So when Shelley suggested that there was a way to bring in-depth information into the gallery for those who want it, I was happy to help find appropriate material. For example, the code on the label for the Museum’s statue of Senwosret III will take you to an article about the king’s reign. There you will find information on his building projects, his appointment of his son as co-regent—a sort of co-king-in-training—and his pyramid. All of this information is drawn from the latest scientific studies of the reign. The QR code with the faience shabti called “The Lady Sati” leads you to an article describing the process of making this material drawn from a basic Egyptology source—Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw’s Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology.

Senwosret III, on view in Egypt Reborn (now with QR code), was one of the most powerful kings of the Twelfth Dynasty.

All of the articles linked to the Museum’s objects have been vetted by curators. When we read an article, we could see from the footnotes whether or not it was based on standard interpretations by professional, scientific scholars. Ancient Egyptian art is the object of interest for both scientific scholars and a wide variety of other researchers using non-scientific means. The Museum adheres to scientific standards, so curators insured that all the linked articles are part of our interpretive tradition.

QR code in the gallery links to Senwosret III's Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia’s reputation with scholars and teachers is a mixed bag. Many teachers forbid its use because students are not always ready to read the articles found there critically. I was also wary about linking the Museum’s objects to a source that varies greatly in quality. But with proper vetting, Wikipedia offers additional background about the Museum’s objects based on the best information. I hope that this experiment with QR codes will help enhance the visitor’s experience in visiting the Egyptian and Ancient Near East collections.

I had to wonder if the reason QR was getting good take up in Indy was its pairing with Wikipedia.  In our own experiments with putting Wikipedia in the galleries, we’ve seen a great deal of success.  You may remember WikiPop: the Wikipedia resource for Seductive Subversion?  As I reported in a subsequent post, WikiPop, was one of our most popular in-gallery interactives to date with 1/3 visitors to the exhibition spending ten minutes at a time looking at approximately 11 articles.  After all, we all know the power of Wikipedia’s statistics—in just a month, Wikipedia sees an extraordinary amount of traffic…482 million unique visitors, 18.1 billion pageviews.  Simply put, Wikipedia is a well-used resource and it’s likely something that visitors find incredibly familiar because of the daily presence in their lives. What we know of QR is almost the opposite.  QR is dominated by technical frustration, marketing interests, low scan rates and user confusion.  Could Wikipedia get visitors over QR code hump of technical hurdles and poor user experience?

WikiLink installed in Connecting Cultures on Coffin in the Form of a Nike Sneaker.

Today we embark on a new trial project called WikiLink that pairs Wikipedia articles with QR codes on objects in two of our galleries—the new Connecting Cultures exhibition and the Egyptian and Near East galleries.  With WikiLink, curators have selected Wikipedia articles that are relevant to certain works of art and may be helpful to visitors as extended information.  After scanning a few codes, visitors are surveyed about the project on their mobile devices.

My hope is that by leveraging the most accessible platform for information (Wikipedia) that we see QR code use increase, but why do we care about this?  Well, as frankly as I can put this, we can spend a lot of time and money devising all the fancy location-aware apps we can muster, but the fact remains that QR is an incredibly lightweight and compelling way to get visitors more information.  For those institutions on limited budgets and staffing, this equation is one that we have to pay attention to and if we can increase use in general, then anything we put behind QR will benefit.  In this trial, we are going to be looking at metrics across all QR use in the building to see if we can  get these numbers up across the board.

WikiLink will be installed through the summer for a three to four month trial.  At the end of it, curators, technologists, and interpretive staff will be looking at the statistics and the visitor feedback we’ve received to determine if the project is worth continuing or expanding upon; stay tuned for our findings.  In the meantime, Ed Bleiberg, one of our Managing Curators and Curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art will blog tomorrow about the complexities of selecting the Wikipedia articles for this project.

In general, our staff at the Visitor Desk is seeing increased QR awareness among visitors and a rise in demand for the mobile palm card we produced, but stats will help us tell the story. If you remember, we were trying codes in several ways.  If you don’t, it might be a good idea to review the first post before continuing with this one.

We put a code on the back of our entrance tags that served as an introduction what visitors might find behind QR codes throughout the building.  Every visitor coming in the door gets one of these tags, but only 1.77% of visitors responded by scanning the code.

Of the visitors that scanned the code on the entrance tags, an average 41% of those users (.728% of total visitors) scanned the tags that would let them mobile search The Dinner Party, Luce Visible Storage or play Gallery Tag.  At first glance this looks like a win, right?  Well, that’s true until you compare pre and post QR code use.  These numbers are a little tricky for various reasons, but when looking at Gallery Tag as an example we saw a five-fold drop in use….and five-fold is a very conservative extrapolation from the stats.

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Of the visitors that scanned the code on the entrance tags, an average 3.37% of those users (.059% of total visitors) scanned the codes that were placed on objects.  That may seem very low overall, but finding the codes we had placed on 30 objects out of the 3000+ on view, was a bit of a task—I’m honestly surprised the numbers were as high as they were.  In terms of the content, visitors “liked” the poems much more than they “disliked” them with a 3-1 margin, so using this material as a trial proved to be pretty sound.

Lastly, we put a QR code on all the advertising for The Latino List, so people could download the exhibition’s iPhone app.  Given the amount of advertising that was done, it seems incredible that the code was scanned only 118 times.  Yes, that’s right, 118 scans, but this figure seems right in line with Adam Greenfield’s research at Urbanscale.

So, I think what we end up with is simply a project that isn’t an overwhelming success or failure.  Certainly, QR on advertising didn’t do so well for us.  QR use in the building is overall very low, with visitors seeming to favor application-like uses for it.  However, compared to pre-QR code use, the use of those applications dropped significantly.  This suggests that QR might be appropriate for special projects, but that we probably need to stay away from it as a baseline visitor amenity if we are to be at all inclusive about how we serve content.

If you are using QR in your museum and have stats on use, I’d be curious to hear if your experience is the same or differs.  If you are a visitor who’s used QR here, I’d love to know your thoughts on your experience.  What do you think? Is this a win, lose or draw?

Do we really need QR codes on TSA signs? Is this sign not clear enough without them? What's even more frustrating is the codes don't even send you to a site that's optimized for mobile.

As critical as I am, there have been some really good uses in museums and I think we are starting to see a tide change in New York City. For starters, the city is using them on all the building permits, so you can learn more as you pass construction sites.  There are plans in the works for QR codes on all the restaurant inspections plaques. If there’s one thing that would motivate people to jump the technical hurdles of installing a QR reader, this would be it—the notion that we could see the actual violations that led to a restaurant’s letter grade makes QR truly useful for those of us who obsess about where we eat.

When looking at a possible implementation at the Brooklyn Museum, there are considerations to think about—we’ve got a community-minded mission that takes accessibility very seriously and we are aware that a very large portion of our visitors don’t have the smartphones required to use the codes.  That said, we want to start looking at what this equation means for us and, as a result, we’ve just installed QR codes in the Museum as an experiment to see how visitors respond. We are evaluating several different types of uses.

To increase visibility, a code is printed on the back of our entrance tags. Scanning it takes you to a page that describes what scanning codes throughout the building will get you.

In The Dinner Party and Luce Visible Storage, you can use the QR to jump to mobile versions of our collections database.  Each of these galleries provides limited information on the walls and, instead, we ask visitors to use kiosks to retrieve information about objects. By installing QR codes, we are providing additional means to view that information via mobile, but no one is left out of the experience—if they don’t have the technology, they can use the computers instead.

Scanning the QR code in the gallery takes you to a search page formatted for mobile devices. If you can't scan the code, signage also gives you the mobile URL. If you don't have a mobile device, you can still use in-gallery kiosks.

We are also testing the idea of QR as an on-demand platform.  For the last year, our mobile game, Gallery Tag!, has been integrated into our mobile app, but its use has been quite low. While we have gotten good feedback from visitors who’ve played it, the visibility of the game buried within our mobile presence has made it difficult to find, so we are putting the game behind a QR code to see if it helps make the application more visible within the exhibition space.

Lastly, we’ve created a poetry trail throughout the museum using the poems that Raj Arumugam composed using our collection online.  This takes community-generated content from the web and puts it next to the objects in the gallery, showcasing a community voice in the permanent collections.  We are interested to see if codes are scanned for individual objects and if visitors are interested in community generated content as another layer in the gallery. The question does remain—can this content be found?  QR codes are striking and catch the eye, but with 3000+ objects on view, it will be difficult to find the 30 codes sprinkled throughout the museum that reveal poems. This part of the trial may prove to give us information that is too limited.

QR codes installed near objects in the permanent collection link to poetry.

In the QR code trial, we want to make sure the codes do not create unnecessary confusion or exclusion for visitors and, to this end, we’ve created a mobile palm card to help explain things.  While we still expect use to be fairly low, we’ll be looking at metrics and comparing them to other types of mobile use, namely our mobile website and our mobile app—we are curious to see if pickup rate increases as we move to an on-demand system using readily off the shelf technology.

Mobile palm cards explain the various mobile options, including directions on finding and installing QR readers. Cards are located at the visitor desk in the lobby and all the floors along with our maps and audio guide information.

This experiment may change how we develop for mobile in the future, so I’ll report back on our findings in a couple of months.  In the meantime, we’d love for you to come try them out and let us know about your experience.