The document discusses personalized access to cultural heritage materials, emphasizing pathways for navigating these resources. It highlights the challenges users face in navigating vast online information and outlines research projects aimed at improving user experiences through personalization and recommender systems. The initiative involves collaboration among multiple universities and cultural heritage organizations to create tailored pathways that enhance knowledge discovery.

1. Using Pathways for Navigating
and Personalised Access to
Cultural Heritage Materials
Paul Clough
The Information School
University of Sheffield
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

2. The Information School
• Formerly known as the Department of
Information Studies
– Formed in 1963 (PG School of Librarianship)
– Now in the faculty of social science
– http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/
• Leading researchers past and present include
– Tom Wilson
– Micheline Beaulieu
– Steve Whittaker
– Mark Sanderson
– Peter Willett
– Nigel Ford
• Now part of the emerging iSchool movement
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

3. Sheffield IR group
• Four academics
– Prof. Nigel Ford (group leader)
– Dr. Paul Clough
– Dr. Robert Villa
– Prof. Elaine Toms (currently Dalhousie University)
• Four RAs
– Paula Goodale and Mark Hall (PATHS)
– Evangelos Kanoulas (EFireEval)
– Monica Paramita (ACCURAT)
• Currently 6 PhD students
– Mixture of library and information science and computer science
backgrounds
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

4. My areas of research
http://ir.shef.ac.uk/cloughie/
• Text re-use and plagiarism detection
• Multilingual information access
• Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR)
• Multimedia retrieval (images)
• Evaluation of IR systems
• User interfaces and interaction
• Construction of corpora and evaluation
resources
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

5. Recent and current research projects
• Mining imprecise regions from the Web (EPSRC and
Ordnance Survey)
• Improving Information Finding at the UK National Archives
(TNA)
• User-Centered Design of a Recommender System for a
'Universal' Library Catalogue (AHRC and OCLC Inc.)
• Analysis and evaluation of Comparable Corpora for Under
Resourced Areas of machine Translation (EU FP7)
• Personalised Access to Cultural Heritage Spaces (EU FP7)
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

6. Providing Personalised Access to
Cultural Heritage Spaces
http://www.paths-project.eu/
Clough, P. Stevenson, M & Ford, N. (2011) Personalising Access
to Cultural Heritage Collections using Pathways, In Proceedings
of Workshop on Personalised Access To Cultural Heritage
(PATCH ‘11), IUI 2011.
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

7. Information access in Cultural Heritage
• Significant amounts of CH material available online
– Web portals, digital libraries, aggregated portals (e.g.
Europeana), Wikipedia, …
• 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
• Contrast with traditional mechanisms (e.g. museums)
• Cultural institutions looking at new ways of providing
rich user experiences to support lifelong learning
– user participation (e.g. web2.0), personalisation, …
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

8. Personalisation in Cultural Heritage
• Over 20 years of research in using personalisation to
improve the user experience in cultural heritage
– adapt the suggestion and presentation of information
(adaptive hypermedia systems) for physical and virtual worlds
– well-suited application domain for personalisation
• Involves modelling users, groups and communities to
provide appropriate content
– provides personalised learning experiences
– Recent emphasis on semantic and social web
– development of collection-specific ontologies (e.g. CHIP)
– user-generated content seen as a useful form of metadata
– Derived from: Ardissono et al. (forthcoming 2011)
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

9. Typical user groups in cultural heritage
• General user
– e.g. cultural tourist
• School child
• Academic user
Derived from Europeana
– students
user studies
– teachers
http://www.europeana.org
• Expert researcher
– e.g. museum curators
• Professional user,
– e.g. librarian, archivist, etc
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

10. Uses of cultural heritage websites
• For entertainment/leisure
Derived from
– general interest, browsing Europeana user studies
• To gain new knowledge http://www.europeana.org
– specific interest, targeted
• To locate interesting items
– purposive, pre-visit
• To develop communities of interest
– sharing – opinions, knowledge, personal artefacts
– social platform
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

11. Information seeking behaviours
• Information tasks by professionals (Amin et al., 2008)
– information gathering (63.0%) • Topic search
– information exchange (13.0%) • Comparison
• Combination
– fact-finding (10.2%)
• Exploration
– keeping-up-to-date (8.3%) • Relationship search
– information maintenance (5.6%)
• Information seeking by non-experts (Skov & Ingwersen, 2008)
– focus on virtual museum visitors
• Highly visual experience
– broad coverage of needs/characteristics
• Meaning making
– educational purposes including making • Known-item searching
sense of items in a collection • Exploratory behaviour
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

12. Related projects
• Steve: the museum social tagging project
– http://www.steve.museum/
• The SmartMuseum project
– http://www.smartmuseum.eu/
• Personal Experience with Active Cultural Heritage
– http://peach.fbk.eu/home.html
• Cultural Heritage Information Personalisation
– http://www.chip-project.org/
• Personalisation of the Digital Library Experience
– http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/imls/poodle/
• The Ensemble (Walden’s Paths) project
– http://ensemble.tamu.edu/walden_info
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

13. Personalised Access To cultural Heritage
Spaces (PATHS)
• STREP funded under the FP7 programme
• Duration of 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
• Project management
– 334 person months
– 8 work packages
– 22 deliverables
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

14. The consortium
• 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
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

15. Additional user groups
• Wiltshire Heritage Museum
• Imperial War Museum
• The UK National Archives
• Archaeology Data Service
• Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze
• Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes
• Biblioteca Nacional de España
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

16. 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, groups or
communities of users
• Show links to other items within and external to an item
to help users contextualise and interpret the item
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

17. Project objectives
• Analysis of users’ requirements for discovering
knowledge 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 applied to multiple data sources
• Techniques for providing personalised access to Cultural
Heritage content (e.g. recommender systems)
• Versions for use on mobile devices and Facebook
• Evaluation with user groups and field trials
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

18. Research areas
• Information Access
– user-driven navigation through collections of information
– knowledge of users’ requirements for access to cultural heritage
collections
– modelling of user preferences and navigational 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)
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

19. Pathways for navigation and personalisation
• Navigation through the information space is based
around the metaphor of “paths”
– flexible model of navigation and exploration onto which various
levels of personalisation can be added
• Paths can 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 an
– a narrative/story through a set of items individual’s
learning styles
• Items in a path can be ordered
– chronologically
– thematically Can be done manually or
automatically
– ...
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

20. Paths/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 (e.g. Berrypicking)
• 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
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

21. Existing paths/trails in cultural heritage
• The Ensemble (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
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

22. Example produced
by Jillian Griffiths
(MMU) Creating paths: an example
Existing subject knowledge

23. Aeneas Telling
Dido of the
Disaster at
Troy, 1815
by Pierre
Narcisse Guérin
Dido and Aeneas is an opera in a prologue and three acts by the English
Baroque composer Henry Purcell to a libretto by Nahum Tate. The first known
performance was at Josias Priest's girls' school in London no later than the
summer of 1688. The story is based on Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid

24. Joh. Heinrich d.Ä.
Tischbein "Dido and
Aeneas escape to a
cave before the
thunderstorm"
The opera recounts the love story of Dido, Queen of Carthage and the Trojan
hero Aeneas, and her despair at his abandonment of her.

25. The Death of Dido, by
Andrea Sacchi
Dido, also known as Elissa, was, according to ancient Greek and Roman
sources, the founder and first Queen of Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia). She
is best known from the account given by the Roman poet Virgil in his Aeneid.

26. Aeneas defeats
Turnus, by Luca
Giordano, 1634‐1705
Aeneas in Greco-Roman mythology, was a Trojan hero, the son of the prince
Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite. His father was the second cousin of King
Priam of Troy. The journey of Aeneas from Troy (with help from Aphrodite),
which led to the founding of the city Rome, is recounted in Virgil's Aeneid.

27. Henry Purcell, by John Closterman
(died 1711)
Dido and Aeneas is a monumental work in Baroque opera, it is remembered as one of
Purcell's foremost theatrical works. It was Purcell's first (and only) all-sung opera and is
among the earliest English operas. It owes much to John Blow's Venus and Adonis, both
in structure and overall effect. It is notable for its use of a Ground bass or basso ostinato
(obstinate bass) - a type of variation form in which a bass line, or harmonic pattern is
repeated as the basis of a piece underneath variations

28. Nahum Tate (1652, Dublin – July 30, 1715, Liberty of the
Mint) was an Irish poet, hymnist, and lyricist, who became
England's poet laureate in 1692.

29. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_50zj7J50U Dame Janet
Baker sings one of the most beautiful arias of all opera, from
Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.
Glyndebourne, 1966. Conductor: Charles Mackerras
One of the most well known arias is Dido’s Lament, otherwise
known as ‘When I am laid in earth’

30. Further paths
• Virgil
• Virgil's Aeneid, Book IV
• Dido, Queen of Carthage
• Carthage - in modern-day Tunisia
• Aeneas
• Troy
• The founding of the city Rome
• Baroque music
• Ground bass
• Henry Purcell
• John Blow
• John Blow's Venus and Adonis
• Nahum Tate
• Famous performances and recordings
• ...
• ...

31. Our view of 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
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

32. Paths through an information space
Subject knowledge Destination
(e.g. taxonomy)
search
Start
recommendations
e.g. WW II
Start Knowledge discovery / storytelling Destination
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

33. Independent paths
• Users can construct their own “independent paths”
– can be saved for future reference, edited or shared with others
– 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
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

34. 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”)
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

35. 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
– students working on a group project - the output of which is a
trail/pathways
– experts working in collaboration to create exhibitions or trails
• Paths may also help identify individuals interested in the
same topics and themes
– identifying where the pathways cross-over
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

36. Users and their goals
• Some users may want to create paths as their specific goal (e.g.
instructors and curators) – producers
– locate and save nodes related to certain themes or subjects
– creating learning resources for non-experts by constructing narratives
– these experts manually create guided paths but may benefit from
assistance with locating and constructing paths
• Some users specifically come with the intention of following trails
(e.g. students and museum visitors) - consumers
– non-experts following static paths created by experts
– may deviate from static paths and create individual paths
• Other users may not intend generate or follow paths per se
– don’t specifically save nodes during their searching
– may benefit from paths as a record of interaction for future use
– generate paths through user-system interaction, allow post-editing
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

37. User studies
• Focus on studying the activities of people who create pathways
– curators, educators, professional historians …
– currently interviewing subjects from a range of cultural heritage and
educational organisations (from the user groups)
• Want to find out the following
– Who creates paths and for what purpose(s)?
– What processes/tasks are involved in creating paths?
– What criteria are used to select items to include in paths?
– How are paths adapted to specific audiences?
– What tools are used to help create paths and how are they presented?
– Where do paths begin and where do they end?
• Also want to gather the requirements/needs of the consumers
– based on user characteristics, how do users follow paths?
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

38. Desk research:
review of previous user studies, comparisons of Contextual analysis and
published paths and path‐making tools, sentiment competitor analysis
analysis
Iterative system
Quantitative:
user profiles,
development and testing
info needs and behaviour,
cognitive styles
User requirements
Qualitative:
meanings and uses of paths, task analysis
Research Literature Explicit pathways: Prototyping
expert‐generated
Explicit pathways: System refinements
user‐generated
Implicit pathways: Final system design
log data analysis
User‐based evaluation criteria: System evaluation

39. Initial conceptual model

40. 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
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

41. 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
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

42. 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”.

43. Realising our vision
• Stage 1 leads towards functionality of prototype 1
– simple functionality for allowing registration of users
– functionality to allow users to manually generate, organise and
share static paths
– visualisations of document space and provision of basic
functionality for searching and browsing
• Stage 2 leads towards functionality of prototype 2
– focus on personalisation and recommendation (creating paths
dynamically and navigating the document space)
– advanced visualisation and search/browse functionalities
• Stage 3 generates the additional applications
– adapt functionality for Facebook and mobile devices
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

44. Supporting exploration and discovery
• Explore different visualisations
– provide representations of the document space (nodes and
connections) users can explore and drawing trails
– personalise views to reduce irrelevant information
• Develop search and browse functionality
– jump to specific nodes (e.g. query or through subject ontology)
– explore relationships between nodes (e.g. “X student of Y”)
– support for more exploratory search behaviours
• Supporting adaptation to specific user model
– personalised views of results and the collection
– personalised navigational paths through the collection
– different forms of contextualisation for items (e.g. linking)
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

45. Creating, managing and sharing paths
• User registration and definition of custom settings
– workspace area for registered users
• Functionality (and user interfaces) to allow people to create paths
– save nodes discovered during search and browse
– arrange and organise nodes
– add metadata to nodes (e.g. description and annotations)
– edit and refine paths (e.g. add and delete nodes)
– automatically suggest nodes to add to paths
• Create paths as goal vs. create paths as side effect of interaction
• Functionality to allow management of paths (as objects)
• Functionality to allow users to follow created paths (users)
– presentation/visualisation of path (e.g. history list, graph)
– path overlaid on document space (contextualised)
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

46. Developing user interfaces
• Advanced visualisations and overviews of info space
– spatial metaphors for user interface
– different types of collection overview and browsing
– document space ordered thematically and hierarchically
• Automatic creation of themed collections and paths
• Encouraging engagement with pathways
– games/quizzes, surprises and use of images
– social interaction
– diversity in recommendations
• Browsing using ostensive relevance feedback models
– use past items (not one) to guide future direction of navigation
• Approaches for evaluating pathways
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

47. Summary
• Pathways offer powerful metaphor for navigation onto
which personalisation can be added
– main focus and areas of novelty for the project
• Paths 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 specific needs for
creating, managing and sharing pathways
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011

48. Contact
Thanks for listening
p.d.clough@sheffield.ac.uk
PATHS is being funded from the European Community's
Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under
grant agreement n° 270082. We acknowledge the
contribution of all project partners involved in PATHS in
this presentation (see: http://www.paths-project.eu)
Presentation at York University, 2nd June 2011