Exploring museum collections online: Some background reading

• Keyword search is ungenerous - discourages exploration and withholds information
• Generous interfaces
  • Navigable presentations of large collections
  • Invite exploration
  • Overviews - establish context, maintains orientation, revealing detail at multiple scales

Whitelaw's key points:

• Show, don't ask → non-specialist audiences don't like search boxes - encourage easy enquiry
• Provide rich overviews of collections, not entry points
  • Don't dictate user journeys
  • Don't narrow their experience
• Characterise collections with the collections themselves
  • Visualisation of 7000 photographs - how can decade, name of creator, etc. convey patterns and meaning unique to that collection?
• Show relationships between items within the collections
• Provide clues - partially completed and incomplete records are intriguing and they prompt exploration
• Good images, stable URLs etc.

• Cloud tag:

Challenges and constraints

• Very diverse collections

<aside> 💡 Ref. the It's Nice That colour folder

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