Building for Success?

Abstract

In the cultural heritage field, heterogeneous materials and multicultural, multilingual user groups and their varying needs pose a challenge for information system design and its evaluation alike. Cultural heritage information systems can be evaluated from a system-centric or a user-centric perspective. This chapter discusses evaluation methods in digital libraries with a particular focus on cultural heritage collections and their distinctive features, interaction patterns, and challenges. It describes state-of-the-art evaluation methods illustrating them with examples from Europeana, the European portal for access to digital library, museum, and archive collections, and other projects from within the cultural heritage domain.

Methodological Diversity in the Evaluation of Cultural Heritage Digital Libraries and Archives: Approaches, Frameworks, and Methods

“…As noted by Petras, Stiller, and Gäde (2013), system-centric and user-centric evaluation are the primary evaluation models used in cultural heritage digital library and archive research, as well as the interface-based approach. Our findings echoed this sentiment, with a strong lean towards the user-centric approach.…”