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One thing to consider - a lot of what goes on in a science laboratory is
exceedingly tedious, even to the researcher passionately engaged in a
question.  The possibility of answering your own buring question makes all
the tedious preparation and analytical work worthwhile, but it does not make
it even remotely exciting nor does it make it engaging to the outsider.
Many analytical techniques take hours, and these days, many are completely
automated.  During that time, the researcher is often off in their office
reading papers or writing papers or emailing colleagues, or folding paper
airplanes out of the data from the previous, unsuccessful, run.

If you watch a Nova, which does a good job of presenting the scientific
problem solving and discovery process, they spend most of their time in
interviews or voice-over.  The raw video clips of scientists at work are
very short and carefully selected to distill thousands of hours of work down
into an hour-long story.

I would think to generate any interest at all in raw laboratory video,
people would need to be engaged with the problem under investigation and
would need to know when in particular there would be something to watch.
Without the passion of the question, I'd be concerned that you might
actually turn kids off - "What boring work!  Just watching a machine all
day!"   Worse yet might be the adults saying "I never see anybody working
there!  Why am I paying all these tax dollars/tuition for a lab that never
gets used!"

Also, when people are in the lab, they are rarely having erudite discussions
of their latest discovery.  They might be gossiping about students or
professors, griping about their work, or cursing (frequently, fluently, and
creatively, in my experience) an uncooperative
instrument/experiment/computer/organism/colleague/advisor.
Privacy/intellectual property issues aside, streaming the sound from a
working lab to an audience with children might be problematic.

If the general public is more interested than I think (or if I just chose a
really tedious field to work in) and people have found such streaming video
to be successful, I'd be very heartened and interested to hear about it.

Dave Smith, scientist and professional developer, veteran of more than a few
tedious days and nights in the lab


On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 8:03 PM, Chris Hunter <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related
> institutions.
>
> *****************************************************************************
>
> We're looking at a possible project that would include live video
> streaming of university science laboratories into our Museum for an exhibit
> on career explorations.  Does anyone know of any similar video streaming
> projects that have been done before?
>
> Thank you,
> Chris
>
> Chris Hunter
> Director of Archives & Collections
> Schenectady Museum
> 15 Nott Terrace Heights
> Schenectady, NY 12308
> (518) 382-7890, ext. 241
> [log in to unmask]
>

-- 
David L. Smith
Da Vinci Science Center
Allentown, PA
http://www.davinci-center.org

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