Kate Fernie

PATHS: Personalising access to cultural heritage spaces

Digitisation of the cultural heritage means that a significant amount of material is now available through online digital library portals. However, the vast quantity of cultural heritage material can also be overwhelming for many users who lack knowledge of the collections, subject knowledge and the specialist language used to describe this content. Search portals often provide little or no guidance on how to find and interpret this information. The situation is very different in museums and galleries where collections are organized in exhibitions which offer themes and stories that visitors can explore. The PATHS project, which is funded under the European Commissions FP7 programme, is developing a system that explores the familiar metaphor of a trail (pathway) to enhance the discovery and use of the content made available in digital libraries. This paper will report on the findings of the user requirements analysis and the specifications for the first prototype of the PATHS system which is based on contents from Europeana and the Alinari Archives.

Supporting Information Access and Sensemaking in Digital Cultural Heritage Environments

User-centered design and evaluation of a system to improve information access and assist the wider information activities of users in cultural heritage digital collections is described. Extending beyond simple, standalone information seeking and retrieval tasks, the system aims to enhance content ‘findability’ and to support users’ cognitive processes of sensemaking, learning and creativity, by embedding tools for information use at the point of access. A generalized user interaction model derived from requirements analysis is shown to be compatible with models of exploratory interaction and information seeking support, illustrating potential for a single system that can adapt to diverse use case scenarios. Controlled laboratory evaluations, whilst demonstrating support for a variety of information tasks, also reveal variance in information seeking behavior by task type and user profile, indicating a need for a system that lets users select their preferred interaction mode in context. Interactions with the path creation functionality highlight potential for sensemaking and creativity support tools to be embedded within digital library collections.

PATHS --- exploring digital cultural heritage spaces

Large amounts of digital cultural heritage (CH) information have become available over the past years, requiring more powerful exploration systems than just a search box. The PATHS system aims to provide an environment in which users can successfully explore a large, unknown collection through two modalities: following existing paths to learn about what is available and then freely exploring.

Information seeking in digital cultural heritage with PATHS

Current Information Retrieval systems for digital cultural heritage support only the actual search aspect of the information seeking process. This demonstration presents the second PATHS system which provides the exploration, analysis, and sense-making features to support the full information seeking process.

Information access to cultural heritage

The workshop on Information Access to Cultural Heritage (IACH 2008) was held during the ECDL conference in Aarhus on the 18th September 2008. The workshop provided a venue to bring together academics carrying out research in the area of information access and practitioners working in the cultural heritage field. The aim was to encourage the exchange of ideas concerning the creation, curation, storage, retrieval and use of cultural heritage information. The day began with a keynote paper by Chris Batt, who looked to the future, challenging the audience to think of uses of technology to make sense of the landscape for users, shifting focus of information access to cultural heritage from search to find. The keynote was followed by a session on the European Digital Library with invited papers by Stefan Gradmann on the infrastructure of Europeana and by Rob Davies on work to develop the content of the Library in the EuropeanaLocal project. The proceedings continued with a series of papers on services being developed to provide access to cultural heritage collections and a wide range of media -- images, text, music and speech. A lively series of poster boasters followed and the day concluded with the poster session and a panel discussion on future directions. Given the attendance at the workshop and the good level of discussion throughout the day, we conclude that Information Access to Cultural Heritage is a growing area of research and promising area for exchange and collaboration between researchers and practitioners.