The current ASK team (Stephanie Cunningham, Zinia Rahman, Elizabeth Treptow, Andy Hawkes, and Megan Mastrobattista) with a few friends.

The team’s primary task during the Museum’s open hours, of course, is conversation with Museum visitors via the ASK app. We usually have two team members “on the dashboard” on weekdays and three members present on weekends. Since the team is currently set up in a shared workspace behind the scenes, conversation about incoming “chats” and sharing of information is effective and easy. Sometimes the volume of chats requires total attention, and team members furiously type out their conversations with visitors while simultaneously conducting quick research with their reference materials (and each other!). At other points in the day, the pace slows down a bit.

Using the dashboard to have conversations with visitors.

Even though we’re involved in a technology-driven project, we’ve found that the most basic materials like a whiteboard, paper and markers, and a giant desk calendar help us to sort out our ever-evolving “to do” lists. We’ve broken our workload into daily, weekly, and monthly goals, and we have key reminders and new information prominently posted. When the team members have some downtime between chats, they’re able to tackle any number of “back-end” tasks that are necessary for ongoing learning and building of internal resources.

Sometimes the most low-tech office materials are the most helpful in determining our workload and needs.

The team’s day-to-day work could include any and all of the following:

• compiling useful information about new special exhibitions
• researching and writing “wikis” on works in the collection for our shared research database
• reviewing recent chats in order to evaluate successful engagement methods (more to follow about this in a future blog post!)
• processing completed chats into smaller “snippets,” archived by the accession number of the work discussed
• discussing recent trends in visitor questions and conversations
• attending a gallery tour led by a curator or a gallery guide

Tuesdays are reserved for team training and development, since this is the only day of the week that the full team is present in the Museum. We’ve been working with our colleagues around the building to schedule meetings that further our collective knowledge and keep us in touch with the Museum’s projects, events, and institutional goals.

Assistant Curator Rujeko Hockley meets with the ASK team to review their recent chats about Contemporary Art.

For example, Marina Kliger (our Curatorial Liaison for ASK) has coordinated sessions for curators to meet with the team. Each curator reviews the content of past chats on works in his or her collection area and offers specialized feedback. The curators have been remarkably generous with their time and their insights, and these meetings have strengthened the team’s connection to the collections.

Deirdre Lawrence, Principal Librarian at the Brooklyn Museum, shows us some archival materials.

We’ve also made some very rewarding visits to other departments of the Museum, including the Library and Archives, where we recently had the opportunity to view rare documents and publications from the Museum’s history. The team makes frequent trips to the Library for collection research, but this kind of special access adds an entirely new dimension to our understanding of the Museum and the ways its rich past still informs its present.

Last but certainly not least, we never want to forget our primary reason for doing what we do: using the app as a way to enhance the visitor’s direct encounter with unique works in the Museum’s galleries. Monica Marino, our former team lead (now School Programs Manager in the Museum’s Education Division) consistently emphasized the importance of “time with art,” and this is a priority that we’re maintaining in our schedule.

The ASK team makes an afternoon visit to “Coney Island.”

In order to refresh our eyes and minds on a regular basis, we’ve established several ways to get away from our keyboards and re-experience the galleries. Each team member self-schedules short visits to the permanent collections as part of his or her workday. Sometimes we spend time together in a special exhibition or a newly installed gallery of the permanent collection to share our thoughts and responses. And we also plan informal lunchtime presentations for team members to focus on particular works of art, and we invite our coworkers to join those discussions.

Thanks to the Museum’s full schedule of exhibitions and events, the depth of the permanent collection, and the iterative nature of the ASK project itself, there’s always a lot on the schedule for the ASK team. Much of our work will remain the same over the coming months, but other tasks may emerge or shift…stay tuned.

Download our ASK team training manual.

Over the course of a very exciting and whirlwind span of about eight months, our ASK team—at the time lead by Monica Marino—searched for answers to that very question. Through experimentation, conversation, a lot of trial-and-error with test groups, and continued examination now that the app is live, we have been able to codify this previously nebulous idea in the form of a training manual (authored by Monica) and through this process better define what ASK is all about. For example, we are able to define the main functions of ASK:

• A tool for engaging with Brooklyn Museum visitors: The primary purpose of the app is to engage visitors with the artwork that they encounter on their visit.
• An on-going experiment and driver of data: Because ASK is the first project of its kind it means that all who are involved will be part of shaping and defining what it is, and how it will be used.  Data collection and analysis is inherent in this process.
• A tool for collection research: Creating easily accessible research tools and resources are essential to the ASK project.

We have also determined four engagement goals for the app. We aim to hit at least two with every conversation, and if we hit all four, it feels like we won the lottery (hopefully visitors feel the same way and based on reviews, we think they do!):

• closer looking
  • Visitor notices details
  • Spends time looking at the object
• deeper exchange with the art object
  • Visitor leaves with information they did not have
  • Visitor makes their own interpretations about the object
• personal connection with the art object
  • Visitor connects with prior knowledge/memory
  • Visitor remembers the object (we can’t, of course, measure this! but we can hope for it…)
• making connections to other works in the collection
  • Visitor relates the object to another work in collection either on their own, or through our recommendation

Although we have these goals set down, we’re not content to just hum along. As our manual says, ASK is an on-going experiment and we’re always looking for ways to grow and improve. As part of this process, we’ve begun workshops with our Education staff in order to get feedback on ways to improve and ensure that ASK aligns with our overall engagements goals as a Museum.

As part of our first workshop, members of the education staff spent time in the galleries using the app.

The first workshop included having Education staff use the app in the galleries and also answer questions via the dashboard so that have they some context for providing feedback. Our next workshop will delve into the nitty-gritty of engagement, reviewing goals and best practices for engagement that may or may not translate from in-person gallery teaching to the app.

Equally important was time spent on the dashboard where members of the education staff answered questions coming in via the app with help from ASK team members.

As I hinted at at the beginning of this post, Monica is no longer our team lead (though we’re happy she’s still with BKM, just in a different role) and are delighted that Jessica Murphy, previous team member, has taken over that role. You’ll hear from Jessica in our next post about how the ASK team spends their time.

When the team was first brought on board, we created an impromptu work space for them on our second floor mezzanine—a space that is adjacent to the construction area of the second floor galleries and currently off-limits to visitors. If you saw our LaToya Ruby Frazier or GO exhibitions, you’ve been in this space. A little sterile at first, they made it their own with posters, working note boards, and the like, jokingly referring to it as the “command center.” Generally, the space worked well and gave the team a place to gather and gave us a place to hold discussions after app testing sessions.

The ASK team fielding questions using our second floor mezzanine as a temporary office space.

As we approach soft launch of the app and the arrival of the new furniture, the team has relocated to a public area just inside the Great Hall on the first floor. This area is a main thoroughfare for most foot traffic (hence it’s internal nickname “42nd Street”), which admittedly makes it a challenging work environment, but that’s kind of the point. The team will eventually be in the lobby, which can be quite chaotic, so we wanted to give them a transition period in a busier space to start getting used to such distractions. Mainly though, we wanted to make the working process more visible and transparent in order to drum up excitement and anticipation on the part of our visitors. And we’re not the first ones to try this. Southbank Centre did this for their website redesign, though in an even more formal fashion. In true Brooklyn Museum fashion, ours is a little scrappier.

The ASK team has relocated to “42nd Street” to help acclimate them to working in a busy space before their lobby move in June.

Taking a cue from our colleagues across the pond, we are also advertising our testing sessions and visibly sharing feedback, though for us it’s in the form of sticky notes on the wall,on  which we invite testers to write down the one thing we should know from their testing experience. Now, I have a love/hate relationship with sticky notes, as I’ve shared before, but their appeal is undeniable. Testers jump at the opportunity to leave us their thoughts in this way, and the notes have been useful for the team to read as most of them are quite positive and a total morale booster.

What’s the one takeaway we should know from your experience using our ASK app?

It’s interesting to see how quickly this is working. Most visitors walking by automatically slow down a bit to figure out what’s going on and read our sign, even more so during really active periods when the team is answering incoming queries during testing sessions or using the conference table for feedback discussions. I hope this continues to drum up visitor interest and helps acclimate our team to working in a hectic environment.

Connecting with curators is a priority that Sara, Monica and I are tackling on a number of fronts. The first and most direct has been listening to curators speak about their collections—what they contain, how they’ve changed over time, and how they are installed.

The ASK team getting a tour of Judith Scott—Bound and Unbound from Catherine Morris, Sackler Family Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

In their first month of training, the ASK team attended sessions with curators from every area of the Brooklyn Museum’s collection that is currently on view—Asian art, which will be reinstalled on the museum’s second floor in 2017, is currently on the back-burner. These talks have been indispensable in helping the team become familiar with each curator’s unique voice and perspective. For instance, Barry Harwood, Curator of Decorative Arts, captivated us with anecdotal stories about the previous inhabitants of the periods rooms while also emphasizing traditional art historical styles and the museum’s great strength in progressive machine-made and patented design for the middle classes.

On my end, I have relied on these initial curatorial sessions, as well as follow-up conversations and museum publications, to write wikis about the history, curatorial philosophy, and critical issues of each collection area. The team will be able to reference these when faced with particularly tricky questions for which curatorial departments have specific scholarly or philosophical viewpoints.

Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art wiki.

For instance, the Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art wiki includes the department’s stance on critical issues like the ethics of collecting antiquities, the race of the ancient Egyptians, and iconoclasm in the Middle East, both past and present. It also provides the ASK team with language formulated by Ed Bleiberg for how to respond to visitors’ surprisingly frequent questions about supernatural and extraterrestrial theories for origins of ancient Egyptian civilization. Critical issues for other curatorial departments include topics like what it means to curate with a feminist methodology at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the importance of historical change and adaptation in African art, the expanded definition of “American” in the American Identities galleries, and issues of repatriation in the Arts of the Americas collection.

Curators have not only helped to identify these topics but will also contribute to the form they take in the ASK wiki. Like myself, Monica and the ASK team, they are being set up with accounts on Confluence, our wiki platform, and invited to review its contents. That is, they can comment, critique, add to, or rewrite both my collection area wikis and the object-based wikis that are being researched and written by the ASK team. To protect curators’ time, however, articles will only be flagged for curatorial attention once they have been reviewed by the ASK team member “majoring” in that particular collection, as well as by me.

Joan Cummins, Lisa and Bernard Selz Curator of Asian Art, works with the ASK team to answer questions during a testing session.

Curators are also participating in ASK app testing. Over the next month and a half, as our team continues to learn the collection in preparation for launch on June 10, curators will be on hand to help answer questions during testing sessions taking place in their galleries. This not only gives the team a sense of how particular curators handle incoming queries in their collection areas, but will also allow us to populate our initial knowledge base with curator driven language. During the post-processing of these initial testing sessions, particularly useful segments of these early conversations (called “snippets”) will be tagged (via accession number) to specific objects so they will appear alongside objects in the Dashboard. These can then be referenced or reused by the team in later sessions. In the future, questions that stump out team will also be forwarded to curatorial departments and answers tagged back into the database for reuse.

Connecting with curators has been an essential part of the ASK team’s training so far and their continued involvement through the ASK wiki and other means will be crucial to the team’s success.

Ed Bleiberg, curator of Egyptian Art, describing one of our signature objects, the Statuette of Queen Ankhnes-meyre II and her Son, Pepy II.

The tour was amazing. We had the opportunity to look closely with Ed at ten key objects on display. One of these objects was, “Statuette of Queen Ankhnes-meyre II and her Son, Pepy II.” He described the significance of the iconography and its influence in the history of art and later religious iconography. The six year-old King is seated on his mother’s lap, an iconography we can see in later works depicting the Virgin and Christ child in Christian objects. By looking closely with Ed, and having the opportunity to ask questions, we left with insight into the symbolic significance of the statue, its material and where it may have come from, an understanding of kings in ancient Egypt, and stylistic choices in ancient Egyptian art—for example, we asked about the elongated toes and fingers. The answer provided us with the skills to look more closely at other objects in the collection—great attention to detail was often employed when rendering hands and toes in Egyptian art, in some works you can even see the details of the figure’s cuticles; this same attention to detail was not placed, for example on the figure’s facial features. While this may seem like a minor detail, it really does change with way that you look at other objects on your own.

The Audience Engagement team working in the Egyptian galleries to write wiki content.

Following our talk with Ed, each team member chose one of the ten objects that Ed shared with us to research more in depth, and write object wikis. The wikis, as Marina mentioned in an earlier post, will provide the team with necessary information when they are engaging with the public through ASK. Over the course of training, and during ASK’s soft launch, the team will continue to write wikis for objects throughout the collection. To be sure that the wikis are resources that will provide the information that we need when manning the dashboard we also practiced using the wikis in an ASK practice session.

Alisa Besher using the app to ask questions during a team training session.

Practicing with ASK with the team in the galleries for the first time, did feel a lot like playing, in the best possible way. The feeling of excitement, nerves, fun, and fear that I had when I played capture-the-flag, and ghost-in-the-graveyard when I was a kid, were the same feeling that I and the team felt when we tried had our first ASK practice session. Two people from the team manned the dashboard and answered questions about the objects for which they prepared wikis, and the rest of the team went through the galleries and asked about those and related objects.

Megan Mastrobattista (left) and Katie Apsey (right) taking the controls of the dashboard during audience engagement team training sessions.

As was the case in a real testing environment, when manning the dashboard we felt the pressure of responding instantly and comprehensively, in an engaging and friendly way. It gave us a sense of the type of pressure that we’ll be under when ASK is live, but, the experience also gave us a glimpse of how much fun it will be. Because the team was being posed with inquiries about objects that they had just studied, they had information and ways in which to provide immediate responses, and different ways to engage those asking about the objects. Those answering questions found it exciting to have to think—at lightning speed—about the best way to share information; and those asking the questions were excited to get responses and gain new understanding.

This isn’t to say that everything was perfect. Each of us on the ASK team feel a deep sense of responsibility to the objects, the curators, and scholarship around the collections. There were plenty of inquiries that we didn’t have responses to, and even those that we did, in the back of our heads was the nagging thought voiced during the session, “Everything I write makes me nervous, there is no room to give wrong information, everything must be absolutely correct.” Fortunately, we are only into week one of training. Over the next two months the team will be working together with each other, and colleagues across the Museum to learn and study.  Including asking all the questions we have to be sure that we get it right.

I delineate here the type of information that the ASK team will have because it is this type of information that makes this app more than just a “human Google.”  Anyone can Google a question, and look up information—what ASK is allowing our visitor to do is to connect with a person who has a nuanced understanding of the works of art, AND an understanding of the different ways in which people interact with art.

As part of training, our Audience Engagement team is walking through the galleries with each collection curator. Here they are getting a tour through American Art with Terry Carbone.

With all of this in mind, how do these six individual humans engage museum visitors with 5,000 years of art? How can the team prepare to be at-the-ready to answer questions and engage in dialogue thoughtfully about any object in the collection at any given moment? It is a daunting task indeed!

To best address this challenge, we have decided that each individual team member will have a “major” and “minor” collection area of focus, and of course, each will have an understanding the many different ways in which museum goers engage with art.

Nancy Rosoff, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of the Arts of the Americas, works with the team to take a closer look at our Life-Death Figure.

To begin our work together we’ve started learning about the full collection in tandem with experimenting with the app. Although everyone will have two collection areas on which they are focusing, it is important that everyone has a broad understanding and familiarity with the full collection so that we can make connections across collection areas (and if we’re overloaded with a high volume of inquiries, we’ll be prepared to respond to some queries that are outside our focus areas). Over the course of training and our soft launch the full team will meet with all of the curators, write one comprehensive wiki for each collection area, write 7-9 object wikis in their respective “major” collection areas of focus, and practice manning ASK’s dashboard as much as possible.