Search or Browse? Casual Information Access to a Cultural Heritage Collection.
Robert Villa, Paul David Clough, Mark Michael Hall, Sophie Rutter · 2013
Public access to cultural heritage collections is a challenging and ongoing research issue, not least due to the range of different reasons a user may want to access materials. For example, for a virtual museum website users may vary from professionals or experts, to interested members of the public visiting on a whim. In this paper, we are interested in the latter user: a user who visits a cultural heritage website without a clear goal or information need in mind. In the user study reported here, carried out within the context of the interactive task at CLEF (interactive CHiC), 20 participants explored a subset of Europeana with no explicit task provided using a custom-built interface that offered both search and browse functionalities. Results suggest that browsing is used considerably more by the majority of users when compared to text search (all participants used the category browser before carrying out a text search). This highlights the need for cultural heritage search interfaces to provide browsing functionality in addition to conventional text search if they wish to support casual search tasks.