Exploratory search in an audio-visual archive: evaluating a professional search tool for non-professional users

Authors
Publication date 2011
Book title EuroHCIR 2011: 1st European Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval
Pages (from-to) 3-6
Organisations
  • Faculty of Science (FNWI) - Informatics Institute (IVI)
Abstract
As archives are opening up and publishing their content online,
the general public can now directly access archive collections. To
support access, archives typically provide the public with their internal
search tools that were originally intended for professional
archivists. We conduct a small-scale user study where non-professionals
perform exploratory search tasks with a search tool originally
developed for media professionals and archivists in an audio
visual archive. We evaluate the tool using objective and subjective
measures and find that non-professionals find the search interface
difficult to use in terms of both. Analysis of search behavior shows
that non-professionals often visiting the description page of individual
items in a result list are more successful on search tasks than
those who visit fewer pages. A more direct presentation of entities
present in the metadata fields of items in a result list can be
beneficial for non-professional users on exploratory search tasks.
Document type Conference contribution
Language English
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