A presentation about the project given at PATCH 2011 by Paula Goodale, Paul Clough, Nigel Ford and Mark Stevenson, University of Sheffield. 13 February 2011

1. Personalising Access to Cultural
Heritage Collections using
Pathways
Paula Goodale1, Paul Clough1, Nigel Ford1 & Mark
Stevenson2
The Information School1, University of Sheffield
Department of Computer Science2, University of Sheffield
http://www.paths-project.eu/eng
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

2. Overview
• Information access in cultural heritage
• The PATHS project received funding from
the European Community
• Pathways for navigation and personalised
access
• Summary
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

3. Information access in Cultural Heritage
• Significant amounts of CH material available online
– Web portals, digital libraries, Wikipedia …
– aggregated portals (e.g. Europeana)
• Users may find it difficult to navigate and interpret
wealth of information
– keyword-based access provides limited success
– many users are not domain or subject experts
– limited support for knowledge exploration and discovery
• Cultural institutions looking at new ways of providing
rich user experiences
– user participation (e.g. web2.0), personalisation, …
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

4. The project vision
• Provide functionality to support user‟s knowledge discovery and
exploration
• The use of pathways/trails to help users navigate and explore the
information space
• The use of personalisation (e.g. recommender systems) to adapt
views/paths to specific users or groups of users
• Show links to other items within and external to an item to help
users contextualise and interpret the item
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

5. Differing types of search task
Task type Example
Specific fact-finding How many works by Henry Bishop are in the collection?
Extended fact-finding Which of the following artists lived during the same time
period?
Open-ended browsing Find as many artists as you can who lived between 1800 and
1900.
Exploration Find an abstract painting that you like in the collection
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

6. Personalised Access To cultural Heritage
Spaces (PATHS)
• STREP funded under the Community's Seventh
Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under
grant agreement n 270082
• 36 months
– 1st January 2011 to 31st December 2013
• Budget – 3,199,299 euros in total
– 2,300,000 euros EU grant
• 6 partners in 5 countries
• 334 person months
• 8 work packages
• 22 deliverables
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

7. The consortium
• PATHS is a partnership project which involves the
work of many individuals:
• Two universities
– Sheffield University
– Universidad del Pais Vasco
• Two technology enterprises
– i-sieve technologies Ltd
– Asplan Viak Internet Ltd
• Two cultural heritage enterprises
– MDR Partners
– Alinari 24 Ore Spa
• Additional content provider
– Europeana
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

8. Europeana
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011
3/2/2011 © The University of Sheffield

9. Project objectives
• Analysis of users‟ requirements for discovering knowledge in based
on Cultural Heritage collections and construction of pathways/trails
• Automated organisation and enrichment of Cultural Heritage content
for use within a navigation system
• Implementation of a system for navigating Cultural Heritage
resources that is applied to data provided by Europeana and Alinari
• Techniques for providing personalised access to Cultural Heritage
content (e.g. recommender systems)
• Porting the navigation system for use on mobile devices and
Facebook
• Evaluation with user groups and in field trials
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

10. Research areas
• Information Access
– user-driven navigation through collections of information
– knowledge of users‟ requirements for access to cultural heritage
collections
– modeling of user preferences and context
• Educational Informatics
– adapting to individual learners in relation to being directed and
being allowed the freedom to explore autonomously
• Content Interpretation and Enrichment
– representation and sharing of information about items in Digital
Libraries
– identifying background information related to the items in cultural
heritage collections (e.g. links to Wikipedia pages)
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

11. Pathways for navigation and personalisation
• Navigation through the information is based around the
metaphor of “paths”
– flexible model of navigation and exploration onto which various
levels of personalisation can be added
• Paths provide the following information
Which can be
– a history of where the user has been adapted and
– suggestions of where the user might go next mapped to
– a (thematic) narrative through a set of items individual
learning styles
• Items in a path can be ordered
– chronologically
– thematically
– ...
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

12. Paths and trails have been studied in many fields
• Trails (Memex, 1945)
– Associative trails explicitly created by users forming links
between stored materials to help others navigate
• Destinations (search engines and web analytics)
– Origin/landing page (from query), intermediate pages and
destination page
• Search strategies (information seeking)
– Users moving between information sources, perhaps due to
changes in their information needs
• Guided tours (hypertext)
– authors create sequence of pages useful to others (manual)
– automatically generated trails to assist with web navigation
– used in educational informatics and cultural heritage
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

13. Example paths/trails in cultural heritage
• The Walden‟s Paths project
– http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/walden/
– allow educators to arrange web pages into a series of sequential
paths on specific topics
– educators can add comments at each node
– highly prescriptive and users cannot deviate from paths
• Thematic trails – Louvre
– http://www.louvre.fr/llv/activite/liste_parcours.jsp?bmLocale=en
– selection of works that typify a period, artistic movement or
theme (routes provide narrative when viewing physical objects)
– trails can be viewed online or printed prior to visit to museum
– prescriptive with limited interactivity and personalisation
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

14. Pathways
• A path is a „route‟ through an information space
– defined as collections of cultural heritage resources
– consists of nodes and links to connect nodes (graph)
• Nodes can be connected in different ways
– pre-computed based on similarity between items
– computed on-the-fly (automated) and personalised
– defined by system/designers (guided paths)
– defined by users (individual or collectively)
• Exist as information objects in their own right
– can be indexed, organised and shared with others, and will be
potential learning objects that can be offered to users alongside
the cultural heritage content
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

15. Possible paths
Subject knowledge
(e.g. taxonomy)
e.g. WW II
Start Knowledge discovery Destination
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

16. Independent paths
• Users can construct their own “independent paths”
– can be saved for future reference, edited or shared with other
users
– e.g. “Sheffield steel industry”, “my favourite works by Rembrandt”
or “items seen during my trip to London on 6th Feb 2010”
• More than a simple list of items in a collection that the
user has visited (i.e. bookmarks)
– also contain information about the links between the items
(relationships)
– descriptive text (e.g. annotations, tags)
– details of others items connected to them
– connections to information both within and outside the collection
that provides context
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

17. Guided paths
• Users can also follow pre-defined “guided paths”
– created by domain experts, such as scholars or teachers
• Provide an easily accessible entry point to the collection
– can be followed in their entirety
– or left at any point to create an “independent path”
• Guided paths can be based around any theme
– artist and media (“paintings by Picasso”)
– historic periods (“the Cold War”)
– places (“Venice”)
– famous people (“Muhammed Ali”)
– emotions (“happiness”)
– events (“the World Cup”)
– or any other topic (e.g. “Europe”, “food”)
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

18. Collaborative paths
• Groups of users can work collectively to create
“collaborative paths”
– adding new routes of discovery and annotations that
can build upon the contributions made by others
• Could be used to encourage social interaction
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

19. Adapting to individuals and groups
• Different users will have differing needs from pathways
– system will make user-specific recommendations about items of
potential interest as individuals navigate through the collection
• Build up knowledge and understanding of users
– cognitive styles
– expertise/subject knowledge
– age explicit
User model
– gender
– language abilities
– system interactions (implicit)
• User will be offered links to information both within and
outside the collection
– provide contextual and background information, individually
tailored to each user and their context
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

20. Learning and knowledge discovery
• A particular area of focus in PATHS will be on learning
and knowledge discovery
– Help people as they use cultural heritage resources to learn and
discover new knowledge
• People learn and solve problems differently
– some people require a lot of guiding; others are self-directed
– some people welcome irrelevant material; others are intolerant
– some people creatively explore and come up with new ideas;
others want to simply answer a set problem
• Users may perform information seeking
– must navigate through information spaces
– different people may require different levels of assistance
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

21. Local (analytic) Global
Learning/problem-solving goals
Convergent goals. Divergent goals.
“Find an answer”. Creatively explore.
Learn pre-defined content. Come up with new ideas.
Process goals
Concerned with procedures Concerned with conceptual Adopting a navigation path that
and vertical deep detail overview and horizontal broad inter- matches one‟s predominant style
(procedure building). relationships (description building).
can influence the effectiveness of
Navigation styles
the resultant learning.
Serialist navigation style Holist navigation style
Narrow focus. Broad global focus.
One thing at a time. Many things on the go at the same
Short logical links between time. Autonomous
nodes. Rich links between nodes.
Intolerance of strictly Welcoming of enrichment (but
irrelevant material. strictly irrelevant) material.
Finish with one topic before Layered approach returning to nodes
going on to the next. at different level of detail. Local Global
(analytic)
Positive learning outcomes
Good grasp of detailed Well developed conceptual
evidence. overview.
Deep understanding of Broad inter-relationship of ideas. Dependent
individual topics. Good grasp of the “big picture”.
In-depth understanding of the Key cognitive dimensions (Pask and Witkin)
parts.
Characteristic learning pathologies
Poor appreciation of topic Poor grasp of detail.
inter-relationships. Over-generalisation.
Failing to see the “big
picture”.

22. Summary
• Pathways offer powerful metaphor for navigation onto
which personalisation can be added
– map onto user‟s existing models of user information behaviour
• Can be used to support various styles of cognitive
information processing
– surface as different routes taken through information space
• Offering users suggested routes will
– help them locate information in large collections
– help encourage information exploration and discovery
– help them fulfil broader activities (e.g. constructing knowledge)
• Ultimately paths could help enhance user‟s information
access experience of digital library resources
– but we need to understand users and their needs
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011

23. Contact
Thank you for listening
Any questions?
p.goodale@sheffield.ac.uk
Presented at PATCH 2011 – 13th February 2011