Tailoring Access to Content
Séamus Lawless, Owen Conlan, Cormac Hampson · 2015
Supporting users in searching and exploring large volumes of content presents significant challenges, particularly when different users have different and evolving needs. The recent growth in digitization projects has resulted in the proliferation of digital archives and collections. Each individual user may wish to engage with this content in a variety of different ways. Users vary in terms of their prior knowledge, experience with a collection, and the goals they wish to achieve. Personalization techniques and technologies offer the promise of tailoring each user's access to content collections to support these individual differences. These techniques support a continuum of engagement ranging from highly prescriptive offerings based upon a model of each user's behavior to less constrained, user-centric curation of content collections. The users of digital humanities content range from interested members of the general public through to professional researchers. Personalization techniques which offer high-level overviews of the themes within a collection may be more suited to the general public, while researchers who are intimately familiar with a content collection and the context in which it may be interpreted can gain more value from on-the-side guidance and connections to related resources. This chapter presents a variety of techniques and technologies that may be used to support the continuum of personalization. It also examines the applicability of different personalization techniques for different user groups and highlights how users may be offered increasing levels of control over this personalization.