Understanding cultural heritage experts’ information seeking needs

A.K. Amin, J.R. Ossenbruggen, van, L. Hardman, A. Nispen, van

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

    33 Citations (Scopus)
    3 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    We report on our user study on the information seeking behavior of cultural heritage experts and the sources they use to carry out search tasks. Seventeen experts from nine cultural heritage institutes in the Netherlands were interviewed and asked to answer questionnaires about their daily search activities. The interviews helped us to better understand their search motivations, types, sources and tools. A key finding of our study is that the majority of search tasks involve relatively complex information gathering. This is in contrast to the relatively simple fact-finding oriented support provided by current tools. We describe a number of strategies that experts have developed to overcome the inadequacies of their tools. Finally, based on the analysis, we derive general trends of cultural heritage experts' information seeking needs and discuss our preliminary experiences with potential solutions.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL'08, Pittsburgh PA, USA, June 16-20, 2008)
    Place of PublicationNew York NY
    PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
    Pages39-47
    ISBN (Print)978-1-59593-998-2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2008

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Understanding cultural heritage experts’ information seeking needs'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this