Slides accompanying presentation of a paper given at ASIST 2016. The full text of the paper can be found here: https://www.asist.org/files/meetings/am16/proceedings/openpage16.html

1. SEARCHING FOR
INSPIRATION
User Needs and Search Architecture in Europeana
Collections - T. Hill, V. Charles, A. Isaac, J. Stiller
Netherlands, Public Domain
1660 - 1625, Rijksmuseum
Anonymous
Arrival of a Portuguese ship

2. Europeana
• Aggregator of content across the Galleries, Libraries,
Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector
• Multinational (40+ countries)
• Multilingual (30+ languages)
• 53 million items … and counting
Who are we?
Searching for Inspiration: User Needs and Search Architecture
CC BY-SA

3. User motivation: evidence from the logs
• From the top-20 queries (2015)
• ‘pottery'
• ‘plate'
• ‘autumn'
• 'Paris'
• Extreme breadth perhaps characteristic of Cultural Heritage
sites: 98% of Wellcome Collection searches are extremely broad
• ‘medicine’, ‘anatomy’, 'art'
Searching for Inspiration: User Needs and Search Architecture
CC BY-SA

4. User motivation: evidence from user
studies
• 54.1% of users say they ‘use [the site’s resources] as an
inspiration for creativity'
• From the personas:
• to create a ‘mood board’
• looking for items ‘rich and full of stimulation’
• browsing for things that ‘jump out’ at them
Searching for Inspiration: User Needs and Search Architecture
CC BY-SA

5. Netherlands, CC BY-SA
Circus Museum
Anonymous
Cirque de Moscou
• Serendipity search: retroactive realisation that the
user “didn’t know what it was they needed to
know"
- Russell-Rose and Tate (2015)
• Inspiration-oriented search: users start out fully
aware that they “don't know what they need to
know”

6. "Paris"
• Paris the city? Paris, son of Priam? Paris
Bordone? Paris Hilton?
• maps of Paris?
• images of Paris?
• facts about Paris?
What is the user looking for?
Standard Information Retrieval questions
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q90
Searching for Inspiration: User Needs and Search Architecture
CC BY-SA

7. A Parisian mood-board
Searching for Inspiration: User Needs and Search Architecture
CC BY-SA
Exposition de 1889. Eiffel, ingénieur-constructeur | Jean-Paul Sartre: Eksistentialisme (Kulturarvsstyrelsen, CC BY) | Parfum exotique, poésie de Baudelaire | Berthe Morisot
au bouquet de violettes (Musée D'Orsay, CC BY NC SA) | Terminus absinthe bienfaisante | La Revue Blanche (Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon) | Réfection de la peinture de la
Tour Eiffel. All images from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and in the public domain unless otherwise marked.

8. Two-step process: finding ‘related items'
1. Retrieve the original item
2. Retrieve items related to this in some way
• Launch a second query
• Exploit user data for common associations
(‘collaborative filtering’)
Searching for Inspiration: User Needs and Search Architecture
CC BY-SA

9. Diversity of Possible Relations
Searching for Inspiration: User Needs and Search Architecture
CC BY-SA
The Mona Lisa (Wikimedia Foundation, Public Domain) | Okänd kvinna kallad Lucrezia Borgia (Nationalmuseum, Sweden, CC BY) | 'Sabena' helicopter (Historish Centrum
Limburg, CC BY SA)
Famous women of the
Italian Renaissance
Creations of
Leonardo da Vinci
Derivative
Work

10. Inspirational search - unpredictable, but
intelligible
Searching for Inspiration: User Needs and Search Architecture
CC BY-SA

11. Reconceptualising retrieval
1. Paths are probably not ideally short
• Unclear what figure or range to design for
2. User convergence is probably low
• Information need varies
• Intelligibility varies
• Social reflexivity may be an intermediate- to long-term factor
How inspiration-oriented search is different
Searching for Inspiration: User Needs and Search Architecture
CC BY-SA

12. Assisting inspiration
1. Conventional SERP features
• Snippets
• Highlighting
• Previews
2. Additional possibilities
• Hit-field labelling
• Clustering
User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) factors
Searching for Inspiration: User Needs and Search Architecture
CC BY-SA
Similar items as derived and displayed in Europeana Collections. All images taken from the Nationalmuseum, Sweden and licensed as CC BY

13. Assisting inspiration
• Inherently and often intuitively relational
• Relations (ideally) mirror real-world
relationships
• navigation elucidates connections
• Supports ontological constructs
• Exploitation of the graph is simple - but
population is difficult
Information / data architecture
Semantic Graph
Searching for Inspiration: User Needs and Search Architecture
CC BY-SA
Image taken from http://bit.ly/2dtpWlv; labelled for non-commercial re-use.

14. Further questions
• Metrics: how do we measure intelligibility and
predictability?
• What parameter values should we explore?
• Link traversal distance: what range is sensible?
• Link typologies: what kinds of links are most helpful? To
whom?
• Can we expect these answers to converge?
Searching for Inspiration: User Needs and Search Architecture
CC BY-SA

15. De Chinese markt
Manufacture Royale de Beauvais
1767, Rijksmuseum
Netherlands, Public Domain
@EuropeanaEUeuropeana.eu
#AllezCulture
21 October 2015