Accessing digital cultural heritage information: users vs institutional perspectives of metadata and searching

A controlled experiment was conducted with ten participants, involving two tasks and a selected set of digital cultural heritage content, to explore (a) How does the metadata assigned by cultural heritage organisations meet or differ from the search needs of users? And (b) How can the search strategies of users inform the search pathways employed by cultural heritage organisations? Findings reveal that collec-tion management standards like Spectrum encourage a variety of different character-istics to be considered when developing metadata, yet much of the content is left to the interpretations of curators e.g. description or physical description. Rather, user- and context-specific guidelines could be beneficial in ensuring the aspects consid-ered most important by consumers are indexed, thereby producing more relevant search results. A user-centred approach to designing cultural heritage websites would also help to improve an individual’s experience when searching for infor-mation. However, a process is needed for institutions to form a concrete understand-ing of who their target users are before developing features and designs to suit their specific needs and interests.