User Needs for Enhanced Engagement with Cultural Heritage Collections

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents research carried out in order to elicit user needs for the design and development of a digital library and research platform intended to enhance user engagement with cultural heritage collections. It outlines a range of user constituencies for this digital library. The paper outlines a taxonomy of intended users for this system and describes in detail the characteristics and requirements of these users for the facilitation and enhancement of their engagement with and use of textual and visual cultural artefacts.

Urban History in 4 Dimensions – Supporting Research and Education

“…A systematic survey of the needs of users of image repositories is needed. Sweetnam et al (2012) nicely break down users of digital collections into (a) professional researchers, (b) apprentice investigators, (c) informed users and (d) the general public. The actual user benefit of applications greatly depends on the usability, suitability and efficiency of the technical solutions (Dudek et al, 2015).…”

Enhancing Digital Heritage Archives Using Gamified Annotations

“…The professional researchers had the most specific and advanced requirements, followed by the apprentice investigators, informed users and finally the general public [91]. The transfer of knowledge was such that the general users would rely on the information shared by the more experienced and knowledgable user groups.…”

“…The study by Sweetnam et al reveals some of these basic user requirements that were found to be common across each of the user groups that they surveyed, such as the ability to [91]:…”

“…The informed users in turn had less intensive requirements than the apprentice investigators but at the same time had more detailed requirements than the general public. Lastly, the general public had very little contextual information about the collection and identified the need for accessible introductions to the collections, which would explain the material they contain and its historical context [91].…”

“…Search is considered a basic user requirement in digital collections [91]. To allow for advanced content and context based search, the documents in the collection should be indexed and organised in a reasonable way [92].…”