From the Picture Press: An Online Exhibition of the SPH Photographs Collection

Abstract

From the Picture Press: the SPH Photographs Collection' is an online exhibition based on the Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) archive of photographs covering the pre-indepencence period, i.e., 1950-65. It offers a unique opportunity to take a journey back in time, to experience through these black and white images, before Singapore's rapid modernisation and transformation to become one of the Asia's most affluent and technologically sophisticated city-states. The main aim of this paper is to develop and evaluate an online exhibition system and to find out its usefulness to teachers and students. From the user point of view, they would like to have detailed information about the Singapore including its history to the present. It was noticed that online exhibitions' user interfaces depend on the authoring tools that the institutions used. It was also found that internet is a very convenient medium for the teacher and public to deliver heritage and cultural information. School children are definitely excited over the opportunity to visit the online exhibition at home alongwith their parents. The findings show that teachers liked the online exhibition systems which had lot of cultural heritage information and also felt that it is a way to go forward for knowledge transfer in the future for the children.

Usability of data-oriented user interfaces for cultural heritage: A systematic mapping study

“…The results of this SMS teaches us that an adequate UI demand to consider usability from the requirements elicitation, to discover the problems and solve them in an early re-design of the system interface [50], and make enhancements according to the testers feedback [37]. Moreover, the best choice to achieve this is through high fidelity mock-ups, or storyboards [53], to test the interface with real users who detect potential usability problems that are fixed in early stages of design.…”

“…The final 23% is targeted at creating or improving the use of digital repositories, includes contributions that analyse an online exhibition to evaluate its usefulness for educational purposes [53], or repositories to give access to emblem books [54], ancients manuscripts [55] and public cultural archives [56].…”

“…The results for this sub-question revealed that 82% of the studies showed interfaces that were not intended for preventive conservation of CH. The remaining 18% are fundamentally related to preserve fragile original valuable pieces by digitalization [28,40,[53][54][55]. Besides, some of them are more related to our own research on monitoring environmental variables [64].…”

“…The studies that perform heuristic evaluation during the design stage recognise the benefits of discovering usability problems early, which makes them easier to fix [53] and allows for an iterative design [52]. They do not mention specialised heuristics or guidelines for CH as suggested by Lam and Sajjanhar [20], except for the study by Martı ´n-Rodilla et al [72].…”

User Satisfaction Determinants for Digital Culture Heritage Online Collections

“…UNESCO defined DCH as "…made up of computer-based materials of enduring value that should be kept for future generations". DCH online collections are usually online-based repositories of digitised cultural heritage assets [9] as a means of preservation. Preservation is nothing without public access.…”