Understanding cultural heritage experts' information seeking needs

Abstract

We report on our user study on the information seeking behavior of cultural heritage experts and the sources they use to carry out search tasks. Seventeen experts from nine cultural heritage institutes in the Netherlands were interviewed and asked to answer questionnaires about their daily search activities. The interviews helped us to better understand their search motivations, types, sources and tools. A key finding of our study is that the majority of search tasks involve relatively complex information gathering. This is in contrast to the relatively simple fact-finding oriented support provided by current tools. We describe a number of strategies that experts have developed to overcome the inadequacies of their tools. Finally, based on the analysis, we derive general trends of cultural heritage experts' information seeking needs and discuss our preliminary experiences with potential solutions.

Europeana: What Users Search for and Why

“…Various approaches have been employed to investigate search tasks, including diary studies and interviews [1], analysing samples from query logs [2,3] and pop-up web surveys [3]. In this study we made use of a web-based pop-up survey from which we could gather responses from actual users of Europeana as they carried out their searching activities.…”

“…Amin et al [1] investigated the information seeking behaviours of cultural heritage experts as they carry out their daily search activities. This included identifying their search motivations, types, sources and tools, and categories of information task (based on [12]).…”

Designing a thesaurus-based comparison search interface for linked cultural heritage sources

“…The LISA application 2 is part of a suite of tools developed within the MultimediaN E-Culture project 3 . The project concentrates on providing intelligent access to distributed and heterogeneous cultural heritage collections.…”

“…In an in-depth study on information seeking needs in the cultural heritage domain, comparison search was identified as an example of an information seeking task that experts perform frequently for their work [3]. Comparison search involves examining objects or sets of objects for similarities and differences.…”

“…Most tools used only offer simple interaction, such as keyword search. This is found to be too restrictive for complex tasks such as comparison search [3].…”