User versus institutional perspectives of metadata and searching: an investigation of online access to cultural heritage content during the COVID-19 pandemic
Ryan Colin Gibson, Sudatta Chowdhury, Gobinda Chowdhury
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Findings from log analyses of user interactions with the digital content of two large national cultural heritage institutions (National Museums of Scotland and National Galleries of Scotland) during the COVID-19 lockdown highlighted limited engagement compared to pre-pandemic levels. Just 8% of users returned to these sites, whilst the average time spent, and number of pages accessed, were generally low. This prompted a user study to investigate the potential mismatch between the way content was indexed by the curators and searched for by users. A controlled experiment with ten participants, involving two tasks and a selected set of digital cultural heritage content, explored: (a) how does the metadata assigned by cultural heritage organisations meet or differ from the search needs of users? and (b) how can the search strategies of users inform the search pathways employed by cultural heritage organisations? Findings reveal that collection management standards like Spectrum encourage a variety of different characteristics to be considered when developing metadata, yet much of the content is left to the interpretations of curators. Rather, user- and context-specific guidelines could be beneficial in ensuring the aspects considered most important by consumers are indexed, thereby producing more relevant search results. A user-centred approach to designing cultural heritage websites would help to improve an individual’s experience when searching for information. However, a process is needed for institutions to form a concrete understanding of who their target users are before developing features and designs to suit their specific needs and interests.
期刊介绍:
The International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL) examines the theory and practice of acquisition definition organization management preservation and dissemination of digital information via global networking. It covers all aspects of digital libraries (DLs) from large-scale heterogeneous data and information management & access to linking and connectivity to security privacy and policies to its application use and evaluation.The scope of IJDL includes but is not limited to: The FAIR principle and the digital libraries infrastructure Findable: Information access and retrieval; semantic search; data and information exploration; information navigation; smart indexing and searching; resource discovery Accessible: visualization and digital collections; user interfaces; interfaces for handicapped users; HCI and UX in DLs; Security and privacy in DLs; multimodal access Interoperable: metadata (definition management curation integration); syntactic and semantic interoperability; linked data Reusable: reproducibility; Open Science; sustainability profitability repeatability of research results; confidentiality and privacy issues in DLs Digital Library Architectures including heterogeneous and dynamic data management; data and repositories Acquisition of digital information: authoring environments for digital objects; digitization of traditional content Digital Archiving and Preservation Digital Preservation and curation Digital archiving Web Archiving Archiving and preservation Strategies AI for Digital Libraries Machine Learning for DLs Data Mining in DLs NLP for DLs Applications of Digital Libraries Digital Humanities Open Data and their reuse Scholarly DLs (incl. bibliometrics altmetrics) Epigraphy and Paleography Digital Museums Future trends in Digital Libraries Definition of DLs in a ubiquitous digital library world Datafication of digital collections Interaction and user experience (UX) in DLs Information visualization Collection understanding Privacy and security Multimodal user interfaces Accessibility (or "Access for users with disabilities") UX studies