Presented at JCDL 2009 Papers can be downloaded at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1378897

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Understanding Cultural Heritage Experts’
Information Seeking Needs
Alia Amin, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Lynda Hardman
Center for Mathematics and Informatics (CWI)
Annelies van Nispen
Digital Heritage Netherlands (DEN)

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Background
• The MultimediaN E-Culture project
– Better understand how search is conducted in the
Culture Heritage domain
• Rich, heterogeneous, combining highly structured
and unstructured information, combining text and
other media.
• Expert users vs. lay users

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User Study Goal
To understand the cultural heritage experts’
information seeking needs.
– Why do cultural heritage expert search?
– What are the typical experts’ search task?
– What sources do they use?

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User Study Participants
Total: 17 experts from 9 CH organizations
Role: researchers, curators, registrars, IT, teacher, student
Age : 21-60 years old
Sex : 11 Female, 6 Male
Affiliation: museum, freelance, university, CH institution
DL experience: basic (2), intermediate (12), expert (3)

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User Study Setup
• Semi-structured interview, 2-3 hours
- Questions about daily activity
- Detail description of activity
• In natural environment
• Data: voice recording, photo, screenshots, and
answers to questionnaire
• Qualitatively analyzed

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Why do CH experts search?
• Object handling: restoration, acquisition, or loan
• Exhibition: finding themes, comparison studies
• Publication: for peers or for general public
• Managing collections’ documentation: updating records
• Building thesauri: used for annotation and search

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Key Findings
1. Information gathering as primary task
2. Searching in multiple sources
3. Communication with other experts
4. Provenance and trust

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Typical information seeking tasks
(Kellar, CHI 2007)
• Fact finding (FF)
• Information gathering (IG)
• Keeping up-to-date (KUTD)
• Information exchange (IE)
• Information maintenance (IM)

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Distribution of information seeking tasks
Information gathering
– Comparison
– Relationship
– Topic search
– Exploration
– Combination

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Comparison Search
“What objects from the Middle-East do other
museums in the Netherlands have? Is there any
tribe or region not represented in our collection or in
the collection of other museums? If there is, we
need to find out exactly what kind of object we
should get.” [P14]

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Exploratory Search
“On specific situations, such as in the Staircase
project, I look a lot at similar examples of artworks
in staircases, for instance, art projects connected to
landscaping or city planning, something like that.”
[P4]

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Where do CH experts search?

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2. Experts search in multiple sources

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2. Experts search in multiple sources

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2. Experts search in multiple sources

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3. Provenance and Trust
“For the thesaurus we decided to use all the
literature which we agreed upon. Several years ago
we did not accept anything from Internet, but
nowadays some. The curators are a little bit afraid
of it, who says the information is correct?” [P2]

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4. Communication with other experts
• “We have regular meetings with other museums to
decide which words should be in the thesaurus.”
[P2]
• “… I talk to many people who are experts in
Rembrandt.” [P6]

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Summary and Future Work
• Information gathering as primary task
– Follow up study to understand information gathering search
process better in cooperation with Rijksmuseum & KIT
– develop tool which is geared more to IG rather than FF
• Searching in multiple sources
– integration of search functionality across sources
• Provenance and trust
– communicating trust and provenance in the interface.
• Communications with other experts
– support finding expertise
– support collaborative search

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Summary and Future Work
• Information gathering as primary task
– Follow up study to understand information gathering search
process better in cooperation with Rijksmuseum & KIT
– develop tool which is geared more to IG rather than FF
• Searching in multiple sources
– integration of search and browse functionality across sources
• Provenance and trust
– communicating trust and provenance in the interface.
• Communications with other experts
– support finding expertise
– support collaborative search

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Summary and Future Work
• Information gathering as primary task
– Follow up study to understand information gathering search
process better in cooperation with Rijksmuseum & KIT
– develop tool which is geared more to IG rather than FF
• Searching in multiple sources
– integration of search functionality across sources
• Provenance and trust
– communicating trust and provenance in the interface.
• Communications with other experts
– support finding expertise
– support collaborative search

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Summary and Future Work
• Information gathering as primary task
– Follow up study to understand information gathering search
process better in cooperation with Rijksmuseum & KIT
– develop tool which is geared more to IG rather than FF
• Searching in multiple sources
– integration of search functionality across sources
• Provenance and trust
– communicating trust and provenance in the interface.
• Communications with other experts
– support finding expertise
– support knowledge sharing

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Acknowledgement
Amsterdam Tropenmuseum (KIT)
Dutch National Museum of Ethnology Leiden
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
Afrika Museum Berg en Dal
Jewish Historical Museum Amsterdam (JHM)
Digital Heritage Netherlands (DEN)
ICN
Contact: alia.amin@cwi.nl
http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/

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Fact Finding
“What is the contact information of the gallery?” [P4]
“To which tribe/culture does this object belong?” [P1]

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What are the experts’ search tasks?
• Fact finding 10.2%
• Keeping up-to-date 8.3%
• Information gathering 63 %
– Comparison
– Relationship
– Topic search
– Exploration
– Combination

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Experts search in multiple sources
Total: 204 mentions
Literature 21.4 %
Archives and catalogs 18.9 %
Personal contact 10.2 %
Visit exhibition/museum 1.5 %
Offline sources 52.0 %
Reputable website 18.9 %
Collection management system 13.8 %
Search engine 8.7 %
Other digital resources e.g. newspaper, RSS feed 6.6 %
Online sources 48.0 %

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