Paper title: Searching Cultural Collections: New Research and Methods

Presenters: Susan Chun (Independent Researcher and Consultant), Christine Kuan (Director of Collection Development, ARTstor), Rob Stein (CIO, Indianapolis Museum of Art)

In brief:

As the doorway to our ever-growing online collections, search is a critical component of a museum's digital strategy, and understanding the ways in which users search our collections is the key to optimizing access to them. This paper will raise some questions museum professionals should be asking about searchers and their behavior, and highlight new research into search that seeks new ways to understand the goals and interests of visitors to collections that include cultural content. We will outline the preliminary work of the Searching Cultural Collections project, a collaboration of museum professionals investigating five years of search logs (representing more than 10 million searches) of the ARTstor Digital Library, and consider some preliminary findings about the search logs maintained by museums.

Session Info

Type: paper

Keywords: search, quantitative research, access, collaborations

Relevance: museum professionals interested in optimizing access to online collections and/or understanding ways in which visitors think about our collections, including collections managers, cataloguers, webmasters, curators, educators

Presenter bios

Susan Chun

Independent Researcher and Consultant and Co-Principal Investigator for the Searching Cultural Collections project

Susan Chun is a researcher and consultant to cultural heritage organizations (including museums, libraries, and funders) specializing in print and electronic publishing; intellectual property policy; information management and advanced search strategies; and multilingual content development and management. She is the founder of Steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project, a collaboration of museums and information professionals investigating the potential of social tagging to enhance access to museum collections and engage visitors, and currently serves as the project lead and co-principal investigator for Steve in Action, a National Leadership Grant funded by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. She is an instructor in the graduate museum studies programs at the Universita della Svizzerà Italiana, and at Johns Hopkins University. Until 2007, she was General Manager for Collections Information Planning at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has also been employed at the Asia Society, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Alfred A. Knopf. She has written and spoken frequently on social tagging and museum cataloguing and documentation, open content initiatives, and museum publishing.

Robert Stein

CIO, Indianapolis Museum of Art and Co-Principal Investigator for the Searching Cultural Collections project

Robert Stein is the Chief Information Officer at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  In that role, Rob leads the museum’s IT, Web, and New Media teams and has played a significant role in helping the IMA become a leader in the use of technology among museums. Under Stein’s leadership, the IMA has received many awards and attention in the press regarding their achievements. Mr. Stein was elected by his peers to the board of the Museum Computer Network in 2008 and has been actively involved in serving the museum community and his local community for many years. In 2006, Stein served as Project Director of the Steve.Museum research project, leading eight of the nation’s art museums in researching the impact of social tagging. In 2009, Stein led the creation and launch of ArtBabble.org, a video website focused on art which brings together 21 leading cultural organizations to create a destination for art video online.

Christine Kuan

Director of Collection Development, ARTstor

Christine Kuan is Director of Collection Development, ARTstor.  She works with museums, archives, photographers, and artists to promote and share collections of their images in the educational and scholarly community.  Today, collections in the ARTstor Digital Library comprise more than 1.2 million images and reach over 1,300 colleges, universities, schools, and museums in 40 countries.  Prior to ARTstor, Christine Kuan worked as the Senior Editor of Grove Art Online (Oxford University Press) and in the Department of Asian Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has also taught English literature at Beijing University, The University of Iowa, and Rutgers University. She studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Rutgers University, and the University of Bristol.