A Very Happy & Open Birthday for the Pen

lisa-pen-table-pic

Today marks the first birthday of our beloved Pen. It’s been an amazing year, filled will many iterations, updates, and above all, visits! Today is a celebration of the Pen, but also of all of our amazing partners whose continued support have helped to make the Pen a reality. So I’d like to start with a special thank you first and foremost to Bloomberg Philanthropies for their generous support of our vision from the start, and to all of our team partners at Sistel Networks, GE, Undercurrent, Local Projects, and Tellart.

Updates

Over the course of the past year, we’ve been hard at work, making the Pen Experience at Cooper Hewitt the best it can be. Right after we launched the Pen, we immediately realized there was quite a bit of work to do behind the scenes so that our Visitor Experience staff could better deal with deploying the Pen, and so that our visitors have the best experience possible.

Here are some highlights:

Redesigning post-purchase touchpoints – We quickly realized that our ticket purchase flow needed to be better. This article goes over how we tried to make improvements so that visitors would have a more streamlined experience at the Visitor Experience desk and afterwards.

Exporting your visits – The idea of “downloading” your data seemed like an obvious necessity. It’s always nice to be able to “get all your stuff.” Aaron built a download tool that archives all the things you collected or created and packages it in a nice browser friendly format. (Affectionately known as parallel-visit)

Improving Back-of-House Interactions – We spent a lot of time behind the visitor services desk trying to understand where the pain points were. This is an ongoing effort, which we have iterated on numerous times over the year, but this post recounts the first major change we made, and it made all the difference.

Collecting all the things – We realized pretty quickly that visitors might want to extend their experience after they’ve visited, or more simply,  save things on our website. So we added the idea of a “shoebox” so that visitors to our website could save objects, just as if they had a Pen and were in our galleries.

Label Writer – In order to deploy and rotate new exhibitions and objects, Sam built an Android-based application that allows our exhibition staff to easily program our NFC based wall labels. This tool means any staff member can walk around with an Android device and reprogram any wall label using our API. Cool!

Improving visitor information with paper – Onboarding new visitors is a critical component. We’ve since iterated on this design, but the basic concept is still there–hand out postcards with visual information about how to use the Pen. It works.

Visual consistency – This has more to do with our collection’s website, but it applies to the Pen as well, in that it helps maintain a consistent look and feel for our visitors during their post visit. This was a major overhaul of the collections website that we think makes things much easier to understand and helps provide a more cohesive experience across all our digital and physical platforms.

Iterating the Post-Visit Experience – Another major improvement to our post-visit end of things. We changed the basic ticket design so that visitors would be more likely to find their way to their stuff, and we redesigned what it looks like when they get there.

Press and hold to save your visit – This is another experimental deployment where we are trying to find out if a new component of our visitor experience is helpful or confusing.

On Exhibitions and Iterations – Sam summarizes the rollout of a major exhibition and the changes we’ve had to make in order to cope with a complex exhibition.

Curating Exhibition Video for Digital Platforms – Lisa makes her Labs debut with this excellent article on how we are changing our video production workflow and what that means when someone collects an object in our galleries that contains video content.

The Big Numbers

Back in August we published some initial numbers. Here are the high level updates.

Here are some of the numbers we reported in August 2015:

  • March 10 to August 10 total number of times the Pen has been distributed – 62,015
  • March 10 to August 10 total objects collected – 1,394,030
  • March 10 to August 10 total visitor-made designs saved – 54,029
  • March 10 to August 10 mean zero collection rate – 26.7%
  • March 10 to August 10 mean time on campus – 99.56 minutes
  • March 10 to August 10 post visit website retrieval rate – 33.8%

And here are the latest numbers from March 10, 2015 through March 9, 2016

  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 total number of times the Pen has been distributed – 154,812
  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 total objects collected – 3,972,359
  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 total visitor-made designs saved – 122,655
  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 mean zero collection rate – 23.8%
  • March 10, 2015 to March 9, 2016 mean time on campus – 110.63 minutes
  • Feb 25, 2016 to March 9, 2016 post visit website retrieval rate – 28.02%

That last number is interesting. A few weeks ago we added some new code to our backend system to better track this data point. Previously we had relied on Google Analytics to tell us what percentage of visitors access their post visit website, but we found this to be pretty inaccurate. It didn’t account for multiple access to the same visit by multiple users (think social sharing of a visit) and so the number was typically higher than what we thought reflected reality.

So, we are now tracking a visit page’s “first access” in code and storing that value as a timestamp. This means we now have a very accurate picture of our post visit website retrieval rate and we are also able to easily tell how much time there is between the beginning of a visit and the first access of the visit website–currently at about 1 day and 10 hours on average.

The Pen generates a massive amount of data. So, we decided to publish some of the higher level statistics on a public webpage which you can always check in on at https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/stats. This page reports daily and includes a few basic stats including a list of the most popular objects of all time. Yes, it’s the staircase models. They’ve been the frontrunners since we launched.

Those staircase models!

Those staircase models!

As you can see, we are just about to hit the 4 million objects collected mark. This is pretty significant and it means that our visitors on average have used the Pen to collect 26 objects per visit.

But it’s hard to gain a real sense of what’s going on if you just look at the high level numbers, so lets track some things over time. Below is a chart that shows objects collected by day for the last year.

Screen Shot 2016-03-09 at 3.50.36 PM

Objects collected by day since March 10, 2015

On the right you can easily see a big jump. This corresponds with the opening of the exhibition Beauty–Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. It’s partly due to increased visitation following the opening, but what’s really going on here is a heavy use of object bundling. If you follow this blog, you’ll have recently read the post by Sam where he talks about the need to bundle many objects on one tag. This means that when a visitor taps his or her pen on a tag, they very often collect multiple objects. Beauty makes heavy use of this feature, bundling a dozen or so objects per tag in many cases and resulting in a dramatic increase in collected objects per day.

Pen checkouts per day since March 10, 2015

Pen checkouts per day since March 10, 2015

We can easily see that this, is in fact, what is happening if we look at our daily pen checkouts. Here we see a reasonable increase in checkouts following the launch of Beauty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as the number of objects being collected each day.

Screen Shot 2016-03-09 at 11.40.09 PM

Immersion room creations by day since March 10, 2015

Above is a chart that shows how many designs were created in the immersion room each day over the past year. It’s also going to be directly connected to the number of visitors we have, but it’s interesting to see the mass of it along this period of time. The immersion room is one of our more popular interactive installations and it has been on view since we launched. So it’s not a big surprise it has a pretty steady curve to it. Also, keep in mind that this is only representative of “things saved” as we are not tracking the thousands of drawings that visitors make and walk away from.

We can slice and dice the Pen data all we want. I suppose we could take requests. But I have a better idea.

Open Data

Today we are opening up the Pen Data. This means a number of things, so listen closely.

  1. The data we are releasing is an anonymized and obfuscated version of some of the actual data.
  2. If you saved your visit to an account within thirty days of this post (and future data updates) we won’t include your data in this public release.
  3. This data is being licensed under Creative Commons – Attribution, Non-Commercial. This means a company can’t use this data for commercial purposes.
  4. The data we are releasing today is meant to be used in conjunction with out public domain collection metadata or our public API.

The data we are releasing is meant to facilitate the development of an understanding of Cooper Hewitt, its collection and interactive experiences. The idea here is that designers, artists, researchers and data analysts will have easy access to the data generated by the Pen and will be able to analyze  and create data visualizations so that we can better understand the impact our in-gallery technology has on visitors.

We believe there is a lot more going on in our galleries than we might currently understand. Visitors are spending incredible amounts of time at our interactive tables, and have been using the Pen in ways we hadn’t originally thought of. For example, we know that some visitors (children especial) try to collect every single object on view. We call these our treasure hunters. We also know that a percentage of our visitors take a pen and don’t use it to collect anything at all, though they tend to use the stylus end quite a bit. Through careful analysis of this kind of data, we believe that we will be able to begin to uncover new behavior patterns and aspects of “collecting” we haven’t yet discovered.

If you fit this category and are curious enough to take our data for a spin, please get in touch, we’d love to see what you create!

Curating Exhibition Video for Digital Platforms

First, let me begin this post with a hearty “hello”! This is my first Labs blog post, though I’ve been on board with the Digital and Emerging Media team since July 2015 as Media Technologist. Day-to-day I participate in much of the Labs activity that you’ve read about here: maintaining and improving our website; looking for ways to enhance visitor experience; and expanding the meaningful implementation of technology at Cooper Hewitt. In this post I will focus on the slice of my work that pertains to video content and exhibitions.

Detail: Brochure, Memphis (Condominiums): Portfolio, 1985

Detail: Brochure, Memphis (Condominiums): Portfolio, 1985

The topic of exhibition video is fresh in my mind since we are just off the installation of Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. This is a multi-floor exhibit that contains twenty-one videos hand-picked or commissioned by the exhibition curators. My part in the exhibition workflow is to format, brand, caption and quality-check videos, ushering them through a production flow that results in their display in the galleries and distribution online. Along with the rest of the Labs team, I also advise on the presentation and installation of videos and interactive experiences in exhibitions and on the web, and help steer the integration of Pen functionality with exhibition content. This post gathers some of my video-minded observations collected on the road to installing Beauty.

The Beauty curators and the Labs team came together when content for the show began to arrive—both loans of physical objects and digital file transfers. At this time, my video workflow shifted into high gear, and I began to really see the landscape of digital content planned for the exhibit. Videos in Beauty fall into roughly two categories: those that are the primary highlighted object on display and those that supplement the display of another object. Sam Brenner recently posted about reformatting our web presentation of video content when it stands in as primary collection object and has a medium that is “video, animation or other[wise] screen-based.” This change was a result of thinking through the flag we raised earlier for the curators around linking collection records to tags, i.e. “what visitors get when they collect works with the Pen.” As has been mentioned before on this blog, the relationship of collecting points (NFC tags) to collection objects does not need to be one-to-one; Beauty expanded our exploration of the tags-to-collection records relationship in a few interesting ways.

Collecting Neri Oxmann

When visitors collect at the Neri Oxman tag they save a cluster of collections database records, including 12 glass vessels and a video.

In the Beauty exhibition, collecting points are presented uniformly: one tag in each object label. Additionally, tags positioned beside wall text panels allow visitors to save chunks of written exhibition content. The curatorial format of the Triennial exhibition organized around designers (sometimes with multiple works on display), however, encouraged us to think carefully about the tag-collecting relationship. I was impressed to see the curators curating the Pen experience, including notes to me along with each video, like “the works in the show are jewelry pieces; the video will supplement,” “video is primary object; digital prints supplement,” and “video clips sequenced together for display but each video is separately collectible.” They were really thinking about the user flow of the Pen and the post-visit experience, extending their role in organizing and presenting information to all aspects of the museum experience.

Another first in the Beauty exhibition is the video content created specifically for interactive tables. With the curators’ encouragement, the designers featured in the exhibition considered the tables as a unique environment to present bonus content. For example, Olivier van Herpt provided a video of his 3D printer at work on the ceramic vessels on display in the exhibition. It was interesting to see the possibilities that the tables and post-visit outlets opened up—for one thing, the quality standards can be more relaxed for videos shown outside the monitors in the galleries. Also notable is the fact that the Beauty curators selected behind-the-scenes-type videos for tables and post-visit, suggesting that these outlets make room for content that might not typically make it onto gallery walls.

Still from Oliver van Herpt's "3D Printed Ceramic Process"

The video “3D Printed Ceramic Process” by Oliver van Herpt is an example of behind-the-scenes video content that was made for tables and website display only.

The practical fallout on my end was that these supplemental videos added to the already video-heavy exhibition, putting increased pressure on the video workflow. In turn, this revealed a major lack of optimization. The diagram of my video workflow shows, for example, several repeated instances of formatting, captioning and exporting. Multiplied by twenty-one, each of these redundant procedures takes up significant time. Application of branding is probably the biggest time-hog in the workflow—all of it is done manually and locking in the information of maker, credit line and video title with curators and designers is a substantial task. It’s funny, the amount of video content is increasing in exhibitions at Cooper Hewitt and it’s receiving increased attention from curators, but the supplementary videos in the galleries are not treated as first-order exhibition objects, so they don’t go through as rigorous a documentation process as other works in the show. Because of this, video-specific information required for my workflow remained in flux until the very last minute. Even the video content itself continued to shift as designers pushed past my deadlines to request more time to make changes and additions. In truth, the deadlines related to in-gallery video content are much stricter than those for table/post-visit-only content because gallery videos require hardware installation. The environment of the tables and website afford continual change, but deadlines act as benchmarks to keep those interfaces stocked with new content that stays in sync with objects in the physical exhibition.

Exhibition Video Workflow

The workflow that videos follow to get to gallery screens, interactive tables and the collections website.

I maintain a spreadsheet to collect video information and maintain order over my exhibitions video workflow. These are the column headings.

All the steps and data points that need to be checked-off in my exhibition video workflow.

By the exhibition opening, I had all video information confirmed, and all branding and formatting completed. The running spreadsheet I keep as a video to-do list was filled with check-marks and green (good-to-go) highlighting. I had created media records in TMS and connected them to exhibition videos uploaded to YouTube; this allows a script to pull in the embed code so videos appear within the YouTube player on the collections site. I also linked the media records to other database entries so that they would show up on the collections site in relation to other objects and people. For example, since I linked the “Afreaks Process” video record to all of the records for the beaded Afreak objects, the video appears on each object page, like the one for The Haas Brothers and Haas Sisters’ “Evelyn”. Related videos like this one (that are not the primary object) are configured to appear at the bottom of an object page with the language, “We have 1 video that features Sculpture, Evelyn, from the Afreaks series, 2015.” Since the video has its own record in the database, there is also a corresponding “video page” for the same clip that presents the video at the top with related objects in a grid view below. I also connected object records to database entries for people, ensuring that visitors who click on a name find videos among the list of associated objects.

Screenshot of Haas Brothers record webpage

The webpage for the Haas Brothers record includes a video among the related objects.

It is highly gratifying to seed videos into this web of database connections. The content is so rich and so interesting that it really enhances the texture of the collections site and of exhibitions. Cooper Hewitt curators demonstrated their appreciation for the value of video by honoring video works as primary objects on display. They also utilized video in a demonstrative way to enhance the presentation of highlighted works. Beauty opened the doors for curating video works on interactive tables, and grouping videos in with clusters of data linked to collecting points (aka. tags). I’m pleased with the overall highly integrated and considered take on video content in the latest exhibition, and I hope we can push the integration even further as the curators become increasingly invested in adapting their practice to the extended exhibition platforms we have in place like tables, tags and web.

On Exhibitions and Iterations

Since reopening in December 2014, we’ve found that the coming opening of an exhibition is a big driver of iteration. The work involved in preparing an exhibition involves the whole museum and is one of the most coordinated and planned-out things we do, and because of this, new exhibitions push us to improve in a number of ways.

First, new exhibitions can highlight existing gaps or inefficiencies in our systems. Our tagging tool, for example, always sees a round of bug fixes or new features before an exhibition because it coincides with a time when it will see heavy use. Second, exhibitions present us with new technical challenges. Objects in the Heatherwick exhibition, for example, were displayed in the galleries grouped into “projects,” which is also how we wanted users to collect them with their Pens and view them on the website. To accomplish this we had to figure out a way that TMS, our collections management software, could store both the individual objects (for internal purposes) and the grouped projects (which would hold all the public-facing images and text), and figure out how to see that through to the website in a way that made registrars, curators and ourselves comfortable. Finally, a new exhibition can present an opportunity for experimentation. David Adjaye Selects gave us the opportunity to scale up Object Phone, a telephone-based riff on the audio guide, which originally started as a small, rough prototype.

Last week was the opening of our triennial exhibition “Beauty,” which similarly presented us with a number of technical challenges and opportunities to experiment. In this post I’ll share some of those challenges and the work we did to approach them.

Collecting Exhibition Text

Triennial's wall text, with the collect icon in the lower-right corner

Triennial’s wall text, with the collect icon in the lower-right corner

Since the beginning of the pen project we’ve been saying that the Pens don’t just have to collect objects. Aaron and Seb wrote in their paper on the project that “nothing would prevent the museum from allowing visitors to ‘collect’ individual designers, entire exhibitions or even architectural elements from the building itself in the future.” To that end, we’ve experimented with collecting shop items and decided that with the triennial we would allow visitors to collect exhibition text as well.

Exhibition text (in museum argot, “A-Panel” is the main text at the beginning of an exhibition and “B-Panel” are any additional texts you might find along the way) makes total sense as something that a visitor should be able to remember for later. It explains and contextualizes an exhibition’s goals, contents and organization. We’ve had the text on our collections since we reopened but it took a few clicks to get through from a visitor’s post-visit website. Now, the text will be right there alongside all of a visitor’s objects.

The exhibition text on a post-visit website

The exhibition text on a post-visit website

The open-ended part of this is what visitors will expect when they collect an “exhibition.” We installed the collection points with no helper text, i.e. it doesn’t say “press here to collect this exhibition’s text.” We think it’s clear that the crosshairs refer to the text, but one of our original ideas was that we could have a way for the visitor to automatically collect every object in the exhibition and I wonder if that might be the implied function of the text tag. We will have to observe and adapt accordingly on that point.

Videos Instead of Images

When we first added videos to our collections site, we found that the fastest way to accomplish what we needed was to use TMS for relating videos to objects but use custom software for the formatting and uploading of the videos. We generate four versions of every video file — subtitled and not subtitled at two resolutions each — which we use in the galleries, on the tables and on the website. One of the weaknesses of this pipeline is that because the videos don’t live in the usual asset repository the way all of our images do, the link between TMS and the actual file’s location is made by nothing more than a “magic string” and a bit of guesswork. This makes it difficult to work with the video records in TMS: users get no preview and it can be difficult to know which video ID refers to which specific video. All of this is something we’ll be taking another look at in the near future, but there is one small chunk of this problem we approached in advance of the Triennial: how to make our website show the video in place of the primary image if it would be more appropriate to do so.

Here’s an example. Daniel Brown’s On Growth and Form is an animation on display in the Triennial. Before, it would have looked like this — the primary image is a still rendering that has been added in TMS, and the video appears as related content further down the page.

growthandform

What we did is to say if the object is itself a video, animation or other screen-based media and we have an associated video record linked to the object, remove the primary image and put the video there instead. That looks like this:

Screen Shot 2016-02-16 at 3.33.50 PM

Like all good iterations, this one opened up a bunch of next steps. First, we need to figure out how to add videos into our main digital asset pipeline so that the guesswork can be removed from picking primary videos and a curator or image specialist can select it as “primary” the same way they would do with an image. Next, it brought up an item that’s been on the backburner for a while, which is a better way to display alternate images of an object. Currently, they have their own page, which gets the job done, but it would be nice to present some alternate views on the main object page as well.

Just a Reflektor Sandbox

It's fun!

It’s fun!

We had a great opportunity to do some experimentation on our collections site due to the inclusion of Aaron Koblin and Vincent Morisset’s interactive video for Arcade Fire’s Just a Reflektor. The project’s source code is already available online and contains a “sandbox” environment, a tool that demonstrates some of the interactive visual effects created for the music video in a fun, open-ended environment. We were able to quickly adapt the sandbox’s source code to fit on our collections site so that visitors who collect the video with their Pen will be able to explore a more barebones version of the final interactive piece. You can check that out here.

Fully Loaded Labels

When we were working on the Pen prototypes, we tried six different NFC tags before getting to the one that met all of our requirements. We ended up with these NTAG203 tags whose combination of size and antenna design made them work well with our Pens and our wall labels. Their onboard memory of 144 bytes, combined with the system we devised for encoding collection data on them, meant that we could store a maximum of 11 objects on a tag. Of course we didn’t see that ever being a problem… until it was. The labels in the triennial exhibition are grouped by designer, not by object, and in some cases we have 35 objects from a designer on display that all need to be collected with one Pen press. There were two solutions: find tags with more memory (aka “throw more hardware at it”) or figure out a new way to encode the tags using fewer bytes and update the codebase to support both the new and old ways (aka “maintenance nightmare”). Fortunately for us, the NTAG216 series of tags have become more commonly available in the past year, which feature 888 bytes of memory, enough for around 70 objects on a tag. After a few rounds of end-to-end testing (writing the tag, collecting it with a pen and having it show up on the post-visit website), we rolled the new tags out to the galleries for the dozen or so “high capacity” labels.

The new tag (smaller, on the left) and the old tag (right)

The new tag (smaller, on the left) and the old tag (right)

The most interesting iteration that’s been made overall, I think, is how our exhibition workflow has changed over time to accommodate the Pen. With each new exhibition, we take what sneaked up on us the last time and try to anticipate it. As the most recent exhibition, Beauty’s timeline included more digitally-focused milestones from the outset than any other exhibition yet. Not only did this allow us to anticipate the tag capacity issue many months in advance, but it also gave us more time to double check and fix small problems in the days before opening and gave us more time to try new, experimental approaches to the collections website and post-visit experience. We’re all excited to keep this momentum going as work ramps up on the next exhibitions!

 

Press and hold to save your visit

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During the development of a major project it’s inevitable that certain features just won’t make it into production in time for launch. Sometimes things fall out of scope, or they get left off the priority list and put on the back burner. Hopefully these features are not critical to the project, but invariably they were good ideas, and in many cases should warrant a revisit sometime down the road, when the dust has settled.

At Cooper Hewitt, one such “feature” was affectionately known as the “transfer stations.” The basic idea being that throughout the museum there would be small kiosk like stations where visitors could tap their pens and “transfer” the data from their pen to our database so that they could immediately see their collections from a mobile phone.

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It was a nice idea, and we began to implement it, collecting specs and designing the steel stands that would support the kiosks. Eventually the parts showed up, but by that time, we were pretty knee deep in launching the Pen and the museum, so the transfer station idea got set aside.

Fast forward to today, nearly a year since the Pen has been in visitors hands and we’ve been thinking about how we can better onboard our visitors, and how we can remind them that there is something to do after they leave the museum. It’s a complex problem that we’ve tried to address in several ways.

  1. Visitors arriving at the museum typically don’t know anything about the Pen. At our Visitor Experience desk our staff are trained to quickly explain teach each visitor what they can do with the Pen, while in the background processing their orders and “pairing” each Pen to a ticket. It’s a critical part of the process and one we’ve spent a good deal of time optimizing.
  2. While visitors are waiting in line, there is an opportunity to help people learn about the Pen. We have a looping video playing in that spot that tries to do this job visually, and additionally, we have small postcards available that explain things further.
  3. On the way out the door, visitors are reminded that they should hold on to their tickets. This is supposed to happen at the door, in the moment where they are returning their pen.

There are lots of other visual cues and verbal reminders happening while you walk through the galleries, but no matter what, we find ticket stubs left behind. We know from our data that lots of our visitors are checking out their websites after their visits, but maybe we can do better. Also, part of the whole concept behind the Pen is that you “can” look at your collection from your mobile phone right away–we should make that happen more seamlessly.

Technically speaking, the transfer stations have been in play all along. When you walk up to one of our interactive tables and “dock” your pen, we read all the data on your pen ( the things you’ve collected so far ) and store them in our database. So, if you just keep walking up to tables and docking your pen, you’d be able to visit your collection on your mobile phone–no problem. But this doesn’t really do a great job of reminding you, or even letting you know that it’s possible. The tables are about browsing the collection on the tables, and that’s pretty much what their UI describes.

Also, we’ve been using an early version of the transfer station behind the scenes to do a final dump of your pen after you’ve left. This is so that in case you collected objects and didn’t go to one of the tables, you’ll be okay.

All along though, a few of us have been a little skeptical of the function and design of the transfer stations. Will they just create confusion with the visitor? Are they even necessary? Should they have a responsive visual user interface? To get to the bottom of some of these questions, well, we need to birth something into the world and see how it goes.

To get started, we chose to deploy two transfer stations in two areas on the second floor. There was a good deal of work that needed to happen. The transfer station parts needed to be identified, assembled and configured. We’d need to set up their built in Raspberry Pi computers to behave properly, and we’d need to work through their connection to power and network within the galleries. Enter Mary Fe!  She is our Gallery Technologist, the person you might see performing maintenance on some part of the technology throughout the galleries the next time you visit Cooper Hewitt. Mary Fe is the person who shows up at 8am before the museum opens to make sure everything is working and looking good.

I asked Mary Fe to work on this project from start to finish, and she’s written up a little documentation on how things went. She says:

I was called in to *clone* the existing and fully working Register station. The stations consist of Raspberry Pi mini computers connected to our museum network over ethernet and an NFC reader board designed by Sistel Networks that are able to download data from a Pen. The Raspberry Pi is mounted in the base of the extremely heavy stands you see in the photo below, and its corresponding NFC reader board is located at the top, behind the “plus” icon.

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What we’d need

  • Raspberry Pi units programmed to save only ( vs. save and check in a pen )
  • Functioning data and power at the locations where wish to deploy the stands
  • The stands
  • Easy to understand signage

The first part was pretty easy to accomplish. I began by cloning SD cards for use with the Raspberry Pi. These had to be configured to “save” Pen data, and not “check in” the Pen so that the visitor could continue their visit, saving as many times as they like. After cloning, we assigned new names and unique IPs to the Raspberry Pi stations.

I ran into a little trouble when I started testing the data ports. Long story short, I had to learn how to tone/probe data ports from their locations in the galleries to their corresponding positions in the network closet. After a good deal of troubleshooting with our IT specialists in DC, the ports came to life and we assigned their IP addresses.

Once the ports were figured out, and the Raspberry Pi’s setup and configured, everything began to work. Right away I noticed visitors starting to use the transfer stations.

What’s next

We have more transfer stations waiting in the wings. However, as I mentioned above, deploying these two transfer stations is sort of an experiment. We want to watch and see how visitors react to them, if they cause more confusion, and how often they are getting used.

We’ve already been thinking of ways we might incorporate a screen to add a visual user interface to the stations. Perhaps a more guided experience would get visitors more involved with them. What kinds of problems will introducing a screen add to the device? Maybe we should think about e-ink, a touch screen, or a thermal printer? It’s hard to say at this point.

The next step is to collect some visitor feedback, look at the data, and start prototyping new ideas.

Getting the IT department your museum needs

You may have noticed, we have a new position currently open for an IT Specialist. It will be open for the next three weeks, so if you are at all interested, please read through this post first and then go apply before the cut off. This is a really exciting position, and so I thought it might be worth it to try and explain why, as the job description doesn’t exactly “get into it.”

But first, a little background. Cooper Hewitt has gone through a real, honest to goodness, digital transformation. For the last four years, while the doors were closed, the museum underwent a complete restoration and renovation to it’s physical building and at the same time completely overhauled all things technology and digital throughout the museum and online. We built some groundbreaking stuff, and when we finally reopened just one year ago, we delivered a truly amazing experience–the likes of which we haven’t seen too much of, up until now.

Okay, so this is a pitch. I’m trying to draw you in. It’s such a great place to work, and we do really awesome stuff all day long, every single day. We rock! Are you hooked yet? Just watch the video below and you’ll understand.

But, really, we have done some pretty amazing things at Cooper Hewitt, and all the while with minimum staff resources and short deadlines. If you are a museum person, you’ve probably read the articles. If you are a design or technology person, same goes for you. Across the board, each and every staff person has had to morph into something new, something present in the digital world. In many cases, without even realizing it, each and every aspect of Cooper Hewitt has transformed.

Looking back, we were able to do a lot of this work because of a lot of incredible coincidences, generous people, and dedicated staff members. And, although many of us were annoyed or uncomfortable at the time, I think we can all see the payoff now. We all seem to now understand the vision behind it all. It is all starting to fall into place for many of us. I’m starting to get teary-eyed, so I’ll move on.

As you may imagine, our needs for IT infrastructure have had to keep in lock step with all of the innovation we’ve imposed along the way. We’ve adopted a complete constituent relationship management system ( Tessitura ) which is directly connected to the way we sell tickets, which is directly connected to the way our visitors engage with our technology, which directly connected to the way we analyze the visitor experience, which circles back to inform us on how we continue to develop these systems over and over again.

Our museum is online. The physical building is the number one consumer of our own API. When a visitor walks around the building, interacting with our interactives, our API is involved each step of the way. Sometimes I can feel the museum pulsating with activity–messages moving back forth from the galleries to the cloud, from one server to another. It’s sort of beautiful if you think about it.

We’re proud to announce that Cooper Hewitt has achieved LEED Silver certification for our museum campus, including the Carnegie Mansion and adjoining Miller/Fox townhouses. The project to attain certification began with the renovation planning phase in 2006, and was supported by architect of record Beyer Blinder Belle, design architect Gluckman Mayner Architects, and Atelier 10, who joined the project in 2011. Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, the LEED rating system is the foremost program for buildings, homes and communities that are designed, constructed, maintained and operated for improved environmental and human health performance. Cooper Hewitt was awarded certification for optimizing energy performance, purchasing green-e certified electricity supply, maintaining 95 percent of existing structure and envelope, water use reduction, community connectivity and public transportation access. #cooperhewitt #leedcertified

A photo posted by Cooper Hewitt (@cooperhewitt) on

Of course with all of this comes an incredibly increased need for infrastructure management. We are no longer a museum that just requires some basic desktop support–someone to fix the projector bulb, or replace the toner cartridge and set up your network account. These days we are looking for creative people who can solve complex problems. We need the type of person who can look at our AWS account and explain to us how we could make better use of “reserved” or “spot instances”, come up with better ways for our developers to continuously test and deploy new code, and someone who can log on to any kind of machine and figure out what the problem is, what service is down, what needs to be patched, what log messages mean what.

All design, all the time. ✒️ Regram @choppingblock #cooperhewitt

A photo posted by Cooper Hewitt (@cooperhewitt) on

So how are things different these days? Well, first of all, the major shift is that IT is now a part of Digital & Emerging Media. They used to be two separate entities with IT reporting into our Director of Operations. It made sense before the transformation because IT was mainly about the day to day operational types of problems like I’ve mentioned above. Ultimately, IT was in charge of making sure everyone’s computers were working and that there was toner in all the printers. The need for this still exists today but it’s a much smaller part of the big picture. Our staff are far more self sufficient now, and we are able to lean more heavily on our psuedo-outsourced-desktop support line through our mothership down in D.C. ( Did I mention we are part of Smithsonian ? )

Now, IT is a central player in the world of Digital & Emerging Media and it’s critical that we approach our new hires with this in mind. Like I said above, we need creative, curious souls who want to be part of something really exciting.

  • If you are obsessed with getting the last drop of performance out of 25 servers, please apply.
  • If you ran your own BBS in 1989, your own phpBB in 2005 or your own Discourse in 2016, please apply.
  • If you see equal design brilliance in both ESU 400 and RFC 2246, please apply.
  • If you like to $ sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade -y, please apply.
  • If you prefer mapping a network drive over just using Dropbox… well… still apply and we’ll see…

OK, what next? Rush right over to the posting and apply. This position is a Federal job, which means it comes with all the benefits government workers receive, including a nice retirement plan, great health care and a free unlimited ride subway card! But, do be sure to put time and effort into the application. I know it may seem a little outdated ( trust me, this is something we need to work on in #GovClub ), but be sure to respond to each aspect of the application very carefully. And of course, if you have any questions about the position or the application itself, feel free to reach out, I’d love to know if you’ve applied.

Iterating the “Post-Visit Experience”

The final phase of a visitor’s experience at Cooper Hewitt, after they’ve left the museum, is what we call the “post-visit experience.” Introduced along with the Pen in March, it is a personalized website that displays a visitor’s interactions with the museum as a grid of images, including objects they collected from the galleries and wallpapers they created in the Immersion Room.

Our focus leading up to its launch was just to have it working, and as such, some of the details of a visitor’s experience with the application were overlooked. As a result of this, our theoretically simple interface became cluttered with extra buttons, calls to action and explanatory texts. In this post, I’ll present the experience as it existed before and describe some of the steps we took in the past month to iterate on the post-visit experience.

The “Before” Experience

ticket_old

First, let’s walk through the experience as it existed up until this week. The post-visit begins when a visitor accesses their personal website, which they could do by going to a URL on their physical ticket. On the ticket above, that URL is https://cprhw.tt/v/brr6. The domain is our “URL shortener,” https://cprhw.tt, followed by /v/ to indicate a visit (the shortener also supports /o/ for objects or /p/ for people), followed by a four or five-character alphanumeric code which we call the “shortcode.” If a visitor recognized this whole thing as a URL, they would get access to their visit. If a visitor didn’t recognize this as a URL, they would hopefully go to our homepage and find the link that took them to the “visit shortcode page” seen below.

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 4.03.33 PM copy

From here, they would enter their shortcode and get their visit. A visit page contains a grid of all the images of items you collected and created during your visit to the museum, which looked like this:

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.37.47 PM

You will notice the unwieldy CTA. It’s big, it’s ugly and it gets in the way of what we’re all here to do, but this was our first opportunity to present the concept of “visit claiming” to the visitor. Visit claiming is the idea that your visit is initially anonymous, but you can create an account and claim it as your own. Let’s say the visitor engages the CTA and claims their account. They are taken through a log in / sign up flow and return to their visit page which has now been linked to their account.

After claiming a visit, the visitor has access to some new functionality. At the top of the page are the token share tools. Under every image now live privacy controls, in the form of a repeated paragraph. At the very bottom of the page are buttons to make everything public, export the visit and delete the visit.

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.38.28 PM Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.38.57 PM

What to Work On?

The goal for this work was to redesign the post-visit experience to put the visitor’s experience above all of our functional and technical requirements. At this point, we were all familiar with the many complex details along the way, so we met to discuss the end-to-end experience. Taking a step back and thinking in terms of expectations — both ours and the visitors’ — helped us rebuild the experience from the ground up. Feedback we had collected both anecdotally and through our online feedback form was helpful in this process. Once we had an idea of a visitor’s overall expectations of the post-visit experience, we were able to turn that into actionable tasks.

Step 1: Redesigning Visit Retrieval

Screen Shot 2015-11-02 at 5.45.33 PM

The first pain point we identified was the beginning of the experience: visit retrieval. Katie, our former Labs technologist, has written before about some of the ways we’ve tried to get visitors quickly up to speed on “how everything works” — the idea that you get a pen, you use the pen to collect objects, you go to a website and you get your objects. Her work focused on informational postcards and the introductory script used by the visitor experience staff. In the case of the visit retrieval flow chart above, this helped reduce the number of “no” answers to the two questions: “do I have my ticket?” and “do I recognize the URL on my ticket?”

That second question — “do I recognize the URL on my ticket?” — is not a question we would have expected visitors to even be asking. To us, the no-vowel/non-standard-TLD “URL-shortener”-style URL, a la bit.ly or t.co, has an instantly recognizable purpose. Through visitor feedback, we learned that for some visitors, it understandably looked more like an internal tracking number than the actual website we wanted people to go visit.

For these visitors, the best-case scenario is that the they would go to our main website where we provide links, both in the header and on the homepage, to the “visit retrieval” page. Here it is again, for reference:

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 4.03.33 PM copy

Since we expected users to go straight to the URL on their ticket, this page was more of a backup and as such hadn’t received a lot of attention. As a consequence of this, there were a few things that confused users on the page. First, the confirm button’s CTA is “fetch,” which is different from the “retrieve” used in the header and “access” used on the ticket. Second, the placeholder text in the input field is cut off. Third, the introduction of the word “shortcode,” which we’ve always used internally to refer to a visitor’s visit ID, had no meaning in the visitor’s mind. We tried explain it by saying that it means “the alphanumeric code after the final slash on your ticket,” which is a useless jumble of words.

Our approach to this was to eliminate the “do I recognize the URL?” question and its resulting outcomes (the dotted box in the flow chart above) and replace it with self-evident instructions. To that end, we redesigned both the visit retrieval page and the ticket itself. Here’s the new ticket:

ticket_new

We’ve provided a much more human-friendly URL in “www.cooperhewitt.org/you” and established the shortcode (now just called “code”) as a separate entity. Regardless of whether or not visitors were confused by the short URL, the language on the new ticket fits with our desire to use natural language wherever we can to avoid having the digital experience feel unnecessarily technical.

The visit retrieval page (which is accessed via the URL on the ticket) also got an update. The code entry field got much bigger and we tucked a small FAQ below it. We also standardized on the word “retrieve” as the imperative.

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.17.46 PM

Screen Shot 2015-11-03 at 2.46.14 PM

Step 2: Redesigning the Visit Page

The next pain point we identified was the visit page itself, and specifically how we used it to explain claiming and privacy. Here’s the page again for reference:

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.37.47 PM

The problem concerning how we explained claiming is fairly straightforward. The visual design of the CTA is obtrusive, but it was our only opportunity to explain the benefits of claiming a visit. We sought to find a less obtrusive, more intuitive way to explain why claiming a visit is an option our visitors might want to take advantage of.

The problem concerning how we explained privacy is the more complicated of the two issues. It specifically regards the concept of the “anonymous visit.” Visits aren’t connected with visitor’s identities in any way except in that only they know the code. We do this because we need a way to uniquely identify each museum visit and the shortcode keeps that unique ID at a reasonable length. We also want to allow visitors to have an anonymous post-visit experience, meaning they can see everything they did in the museum without having to sign up for an account. But we don’t expect everyone to remember their shortcode or hold on to their ticket forever, so we allow visitors to create an account on our website and “claim” their visits. A claimed visit is linked to a visitor’s email address, so now they can throw out their ticket and forget their shortcode. Over time, we also hope that visitors will claim multiple visits with their accounts so they get a complete history of their relationship with our museum.

The problem this presents is that we have to treat every visitor who has a code as if they are the owner of that visit. This manifests itself in a specific (but important) use case. If a visitor shares their visit on social media while it is unclaimed, then any person who accesses the visit will also have the option to sign up and claim it as their own.

Further compounding this issue is the fact that we automatically make claimed visits private. We do this because in claiming an account, the visitor is effectively de-anonymizing it. Claimed visits are linked to real-world identities (in the form of a username) and for that reason we make it an opt-in choice to go public with that connection.

The goal of redesigning this page, then, was to allow the visitor to navigate the complex business logic without having to fully comprehend it. In talking this through we concluded that by consolidating the visit controls (which previously only appeared on the claimed visit page) and adding them (greyed out) to the unclaimed visit we could solve many of our problems. Why have a paragraph of explanatory text about why you should claim your visit when we could just show you the control panel that claimed visits have access to? A control panel presents the functionality plainly and concisely, without confusing language.

This also allowed us to establish a language of icons that we could reuse elsewhere to replace explanatory sentences. We also agreed to standardize on the word “claim” as the action that we wanted visitors to engage in, as it more effectively conveys the idea that other people have visits as well but we need to know that this one was yours.

Best of all, it allowed us to build off the work we’d done earlier this year which had the explicit purpose of organizing our code and visual hierarchy to better support future iterations.

Here’s what that ended up looking like.

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.21.16 PM

Interacting with any of the controls invokes a modal dialog that prompts the user claim their visit. If they’re not logged in, they are presented with a login / signup prompt. Otherwise they are asked to confirm their desire to claim the visit. Once claimed, the controls function as expected. Like the changes we made to the ticket design, it moves towards a more self-evident experience that requires less information processing time on the visitor’s part.

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 12.21.44 PM

Finally, some bonus gifs to show off the interaction details. The control panel has some rollover action:

controls

We use modal dialogs to confirm privacy changing, deleting and claiming actions:

publicification

A Brief Bit About Code

Powering the redesign was a complete overhaul of the Javascript that powers these pages. Specifically, we reorganized it to remove inline code and decouple API logic from DOM logic. In lay terms, this means separating the code that says “when I click this thing…” from the code that says “…perform this action.” When those separate intentions are tightly coupled, the website is less flexible and doing maintenance work or experimenting with alternate user flows requires more effort than necessary. When separate, it makes reusing code much more straightforward, which will allow us to tweak and test with ease going forward. Recent frameworks such as Angular or React, which we’ve only just started experimenting with, excel at this. For now, we opted for a slightly modified module pattern, which gives us just enough structure to keep things organized without having to learn a new framework.

What’s Next?

The changes have only been live for a few days now so it will take some time to build up enough numbers to see where to focus our future improvements on this part of the site. Specifically, we will be looking at the percentage of visitors who visit their website and the percentage of those visitors who create accounts, and hope to see the rate of change increasing for both of those numbers.

One part of this visitor flow where we hope to do structured A/B tests is with the “sign up” functionality. Right now, when a visitor enters their code and clicks the “Retrieve” button, they are taken immediately to their visit page. We want to test whether adding in a guided “visit claiming” flow, which would optionally hold the user’s hand through the account creation process before they’ve seen their objects, results in more account creations. We’ll wait and collect enough “A” data before rolling the “B” test out.

Of course, there are big questions we can start answering as well. How can we enhance the value of a visitor’s personal collection? Right now we have rudimentary note-taking functionality which is severely underutilized. What do we do with that? What about new features? We have all of our object metadata sitting right there waiting to be turned into personalized visualizations. (Speaking of that – we have public API methods for visit data!) Finally, how can we complete the cycle and turn the current “post-visit” into the next “pre-visit” experience?

With each iteration, we strive not only to apply what we’ve learned from visitors, colleagues and peers to our digital ecosystem, but also to improve the ease with which future iterations can be made. We are better able to answer questions both big and small with these iterations, which we hope over time will result in a stronger and more meaningful relationship between Cooper Hewitt and our visitors.

Random Button Television

AppleTV SDK Fun

Recently, Apple announced a number of updates to their product line, including a pretty major update to AppleTV, the small set top box that allows people to listen to their music collection, rent movies and TV shows, and stream audio from their phones to their televisions. The biggest update to AppleTV was definitely the fact that it now supports “Apps”, allowing iOS developers to design and build whatever they can imagine.

I put my hat in the ring, and applied for Apple’s lottery and about a week later a brand new AppleTV Software Development Kit showed up at the Labs.

To be honest, I haven’t had much interest in developing apps for a long time now. It’s problematic at best to go down the road of building something for iOS ( or any brand specific device ) in the context of a museum, and yes, it’s been a long while since I even glanced at Objective-C. But, the device is a curious object, and at the very least made me wonder what it might be like to introduce a way to open up access to our collections through the warm and inviting glow of a television screen. Imagine it for a moment, sitting there atop your dresser, or mounted to your living room wall, next to the fire place, in full HD. The television, no matter how you divide it up over the years has a pretty permanently fixed position in our homes, and in our minds.

As a little side project, I decided to see what I could do with the AppleTV SDK and our Collections API. I decided ahead of time I wouldn’t spend too much time on this, and although I wound up spending at least one night reading up on NSDictionary and a few other oddball data-types in Objective-C, I was able to stick with my original plan and quickly built a little “Hello AppleTV” app that simply allows the “viewer” to flip through objects in our collection by pressing the “select” button on their remotes.

It uses one API method, our old favorite cooperhewitt.objects.getRandom, and yeah, that’s all it does. Keep pressing the select button and you continue to get objects. It’s quite fun!

AppleTV XCode

So here’s how it works. As we say over here at the Cooper Hewitt Labs, “Working code always wins.”

  1. There is a ViewController. This is the thing that represents the screen on your AppleTV, and the thing you can apply all of the subsequent properties to.
  2. There is an ImageView. This is where the image is applied to.
  3. There are a couple Labels which simply allow you to display the title and object ID for each object.
  4. There is a asynchronous way of calling the API.

Here’s the code. There’s basically just the two files for the ViewController that define everything we’re talking about. Beyond that, there is some “wiring up” of the ImageView and Labels so the visuals know what code they are connected to, and there is really the one method “fetchRandom” that does the work of calling the API, parsing the response, and storing the things we are interested in.

And here is the end result.

To be quite honest, we probably won’t be uploading this to the iTunes store. It’s really just a “Hello World” app and only meant to be a conversation starter for staff members who happen by the Labs area. But it does make me wonder — what else could museums do with a device like this?

The device itself is a curious one, with plenty of built in human interface challenges and opportunities. Sitting back, clicking the remote and checking out collection objects, isn’t really my idea of an exciting way to spend an evening at home, but take this a few steps further, maybe a few additional API calls, and who knows what might unfold.

Slowly improving Copyright clarity

Ever since the online collection first properly went live in 2012 our collection images had a little line under them that said “please don’t steal our images, yeah?”. Whilst it was often commented that this was a friendly, casual approach that felt in keeping with the prevailing winds of the Internet, the statement was purposely vague and, at the end of the day, pretty unhelpful.

screencap-cooper-hewitt-rights.jpg 1,181×570 pixels

After all, “what is ‘stealing’ an image”? “Isn’t the Smithsonian, as a public institution, already owned by the ‘public'”? “What about ‘fair use'”? And, as many pointed out, “why are you claiming some kind of rights over images of objects that are clearly date from before the 20th century?”. Some also spotted the clear disconnect between the ‘please don’t steal’ language and our other visible commitments to open licensing and open source.

First, a bit of history.

The majority of the Cooper Hewitt collection predates its acquisition by the Smithsonian. The collection was originally at Cooper Union until the museum there closed in 1963. It was officially acquired by the Smithsonian in 1968 and the Cooper Hewitt was opened in the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in 1976. The effect of this history is that much of the pre-1968 collection is unevenly documented and its provenance very much still under active research. Post-1976 it is possible to see, in the metadata, the different waves of museum management and collection documentation, as new objects were added to the collection and new collection policies became formalised. Being a ‘new museum’ in 1976 also meant that much of the focus was on exhibitions, not so much on the business of documenting collections. Add to this the rise of computer-based catalogues and you have a very ‘layered’ history.

Cooper Hewitt has not had the resources or staff to undertake the type of multi-year Copyright audits that museums like the V&A have done, and as a result, with provenance and documentation in many cases quite scant, the museum has had to make ‘best efforts’.

With the recent tweaks to the online collection, we have finally been able to make some clarifying changes.

Like all Smithsonian museums, all online content is subject to institution-wide ‘Terms of use‘. This governs the ‘permitted uses’ of anything on our websites, irrespective of underlying rights. These terms are not created at an individual museum level but are part of Smithsonian-wide policy. You can see that whilst these terms allow only ‘allows personal, educational, and other non-commercial uses’ they encourage the use of Fair Use under US Copyright law.

However, that said, we think it is important to be clear on what is definitely out of Copyright, and what may not be. And over time, as the collection gets better documented, more of the unknowns will become known.

So here’s what we have done – its not perfect – but at least its better than it was. And, to be perfectly honest, we’re only talking about the possible rights inherent in the underlying object in the image, as the digital image itself was created by the Smithsonian. Some of the types of object in our collection may not be eligible for Copyright protection in the first place.

For objects from our permanent collection

1. acquired before 1923 then we say “This object has no known Copyright restrictions. You are welcome to use this image in compliance with our Terms of Use.” For example, this medal acquired in 1907.

2. acquired in or after 1923 but has a known creation date [‘end date’ in our collection database] that is before 1923, then we say “This object has no known Copyright restrictions. You are welcome to use this image in compliance with our Terms of Use.” This 1922 textile acquired in 2015 is a good example.

3. acquired in or after 1923 but without a known, documented, creation date [‘end date’ in our collection database], then we say “This object may be subject to Copyright or other restrictions. You are welcome to make fair use of this image under U.S. Copyright law and in compliance with our terms of use. Please note that you are responsible for determining whether your use is fair and for responding to any claims that may arise from your use.” For example this ‘early 20th century’ Indonesian textile.

This scenario is far too common and you will come across objects that clearly appear to be pre-20th century that have not been formally dated, as well as objects that say in their name or description that they are pre-20th century but have not been correctly entered into the database and don’t have their ‘end date’ field completed. An especially egregious example is this 18th century French textile that has incomplete cataloguing. In the collection database it has no ‘end date’ (it should have 1799 as an ‘end date’) and clearly should have no Copyright restrictions.

4. acquired in or after 1923 with a known creation date also in or after 1923 [‘end date’ in our collection database], then we say “This object may be subject to Copyright or other restrictions. You are welcome to make fair use of this image under U.S. Copyright law and in compliance with our terms of use. Please note that you are responsible for determining whether your use is fair and for responding to any claims that may arise from your use.” For example this 2010 wallpaper.

Many of the ‘utilitarian objects’ in our collection – clocks, tables, chairs, much of the product design collection – are legally untested in terms of whether Copyright applies, however in many of these cases other IP protection may apply.

As the US Copyright Office states,

“Copyright does not protect the mechanical or utilitarian aspects of such works of craftsmanship. It may, however, protect any pictorial, graphic, or sculptural authorship that can be identified separately from the utilitarian aspects of an object. Thus a useful article may have both copyrightable and uncopyrightable features. For example, a carving on the back of a chair or a floral relief design on silver flatware could be protected by copyright, but the design of the chair or flatware itself could not. Some designs of useful articles may qualify for protection under the federal patent law.” [source]

For objects on loan from other institutions, companies or individuals

5. irrespective of its known age, we now say “This object may be subject to Copyright, loan conditions or other restrictions”.

As you can see we have had to make some very conservative decisions, largely as a result of the incompleteness of our data and museum records.

If you spot any of these (you could download the entire metadata from Github to programmatically do this), log them with their accession number in our Zendesk and they will be prioritised to be fixed.

Small steps.

 

—–

Update: Steven Lubar asked us on Twitter to share the number of object records that fall in to each of the categories. Here are those numbers:

Acquired before 1923 32,442
Acquired on or after 1923 and known creation date before 1923 5,232
Acquired on or after 1923 and no known creation date 136,372
Acquired on or after 1923 and known creation date on or after 1923 30,357
Loan objects 13,477