Museum Web search behavior of special interest visitors

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

  • Mette Skov
  • Peter Ingwersen
There is a current trend to make museum collections widely accessible by digitising cultural heritage collections for the Internet. The present study takes a user perspective and explores the characteristics of online museum visitors' web search behaviour. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was deployed in a case study at a National Museum of Military History. Quantitatively, data from a web questionnaire survey and a user study of interactive searching behaviour were collected and analysed. Qualitatively, observation protocols were coded and analysed based on inductive content analysis. It was found that metadata elements on factual object related information, provenience, and historic context was indicated to be relevant by the majority of the respondents, characterising the group of special interest museum visitors as information hungry. Further, four main characteristics of online museum visitors' searching behaviour were identified: (a) searching
behaviour has a strong visual aspect, (b) topical searching is predominantly exploratory, (c) users apply broad known item searches, and (d) meaning making is central to the search process.
Original languageEnglish
JournalLibrary & Information Science Research
Volume36
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)91-98
Number of pages8
ISSN0740-8188
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 20 May 2014

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Humanities - Cultural Heritage, Museum studies, Web museum OPAC, Information behaviour, searching behaviour

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