I’ve been slowly putting together a list of research questions to try and tackle as I re-work our collections online (with our very own blogger, the transport curator David Rooney) and the ‘Online Stuff‘ section. I’ll write up the process and my ideas as I go, but in the meantime – what’s your number one question about presenting museum collections online? It could be ‘does x work better than y’, or ‘do people really want z’, or anything that’s been hanging around at the back of your brain. Leave a comment below or tweet @mia_out.
And speaking of collections online, check out the V&A’s Collections Search, just out in beta today. There’s so much to explore and the interface is a delight. Congratulations to all involved!
Ooh. Awesome. I have been fully intending to start mining the search stats for ArtsConnectEd, but haven’t yet gotten to it. Now it’s a race. :)
Questions I’m interested in:
- The “how” of searches – how do people iterate collection searches? Do they try adding or removing keywords? Do they use the facets we present to browse? Do they find dead-ends (0 results) even when we warn them? Do they type in artist names even though we have a separate field for that? Are they trying to use us like google? Do they sort by date?
- Very much related: what counts as a successful search? When they stop searching for a while after clicking on something? Just opening an object detail page? Collecting / tagging / commenting on something?
- And also, the overlap between search and browse, and the bugaboo of “Advanced Search”. I am now firmly anti-Advanced Search, but it’s hard to summarize. I think a good browse with a keyword field is really the holy grail of collection exploration (keyword is just another facet!), but I’m not sure we got it right. Any stats / input / ideas on this would be appreciated.
Can’t wait to see what else comes in!
Comment by Nate Solas — September 10, 2009 @ 10:15 pm
Great questions!
‘Advanced search’ is a such a juicy question – I suspect there’s an audience for it somewhere, but it would very much depend on the collection and type of searcher. Or maybe there’s no audience for advanced search…
I saw a demo of http://sig.ma/ yesterday – I don’t have my notes here, but I think that was the one that was exploring ‘fuzzy browsing’, which sounded like something to explore for faceted browsing.
Comment by mia — September 10, 2009 @ 10:54 pm
I haven’t had a chance to look at this yet but http://searchpatterns.org/ might be really useful. It’s the wiki of the book by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender.
Comment by mia — February 1, 2010 @ 7:15 pm