In partnership with local nonprofit arts and media organization Brooklyn Information & Culture (BRIC), the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) in July opened a state-of-the art, three-camera television studio in its Coney Island branch. Outfitted with equipment including HD cameras, a TriCaster switcher, a green screen, and professional lighting and audio gear, all provided by BRIC, the studio will serve as a set location for BRIC’s community access television network, as well as a classroom for regularly scheduled, hands-on studio production courses. The studio is designed to be set up or broken down by trained staff in 15 minutes, whenever the auditorium is needed for other purposes, including library events and classes on other topics.
BRIC provides free cultural programming for Brooklyn residents, ranging from art exhibition to poetry, theater, dance, and music performances. But the organization also views the provision of resources “to launch, nurture, and showcase artists and media makers” as a core component of its mission, and has offered free and low-cost classes on filmmaking and video production since it launched its first local cable access channel in 1988 (when BRIC was known as the Fund for the Borough of Brooklyn).
BRIC’s partnership with BPL began in January 2013, sparked by the opening of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Information Commons at BPL’s central library, explained BPL Director of Information Services Jesse Montero. Featuring 25 computers loaded with premium software packages, including Final Cut Pro and ProTools, the InfoCommons area offered an excellent location for lab courses in television post-production. BRIC had the experts who could teach these courses.
“The partnership is based on sort of a marriage…of what each organization has and doesn’t have,” Montero explained. “We have a lot of locations throughout Brooklyn, and they have this very specific expertise in teaching media production, and media literacy, and a lot of other skills that we think libraries should be facilitators of.”
Classes range from the one-time, two-hour “Intro to Digital Storytelling,” to in-depth offerings such as “Video Editing with [Adobe] Premiere,” an 18-hour course broken into four-and-a-half hour sessions held during four consecutive weeks. Although there are fees for some courses, cost per student is modest. The four week Premiere course, for example, costs $60.
The small classes—which are limited to 5–12 students, depending on the topic—tend to fill up, and their popularity led BPL and BRIC to expand the course offerings to BPL’s Kings Highway and New Lots branches. BRIC also began offering classes and equipment for loan at the Coney Island branch after it reopened in October 2013, following extensive renovations and remodeling from damage the building suffered during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
“Even though it’s kind of away from the center of activity, having a presence [in Coney Island] is something that, as a borough-wide organization, they wanted,” Montero said. “They analyze their community producers, and there are people from that Coney Island area that were having to go all the way to downtown Brooklyn to access studio equipment and get training, so it made [that] a lot more convenient for a lot of people as well.”
A small auditorium on the branch’s second floor proved to be the perfect location for taking the partnership to the next level. BRIC purchased and installed all of the equipment, and as the organization’s first professional studio outside its Community Media Center at its “BRIC House” headquarters in downtown Brooklyn, the Coney Island location will enable the organization to expand its slate of advanced production courses. Students who complete a twelve-hour certification course will be authorized to book time at the studio for independent use and create their own television shows, potentially for broadcast on BRIC’s local community access channels. BRIC will also store and host any content produced at the studio.
Montero suggested that other libraries might consider similar partnerships with public access cable stations, such as partnerships between Indiana’s Monroe County Public Library and the local Community Access Television Services, Access Fort Wayne and the Allen County Public Library, or the Madison Public Library (WI) and WYOU.
“Since we launched the partnership two and a half years ago, we’ve probably offered close to 1,000 classes at four locations—classes that we might not have the capacity to teach otherwise,” Montero said. “We certainly wouldn’t have the expertise to do it as well as they do. So it’s been a really fruitful partnership, and through [BPL branches], they’ve been able to make inroads into communities throughout Brooklyn…. The chemistry has been good, with our mutual missions of access to information, access to training, and empowering people through digital technology. It’s just a really logical partnership.”