What is it about?
The purpose of this research is to help make museum collections more accessible and useful for users. The research used the case study of National Museums Scotland and involved interviews, surveys, and analysis of search terms used by staff and visitors. This helped uncover insights about how people want to search and interact with online museum collections. The key findings are: People are interested in searching for things related to their own identity and life experiences, not just the factual information in the collections. They also want to find images and objects that evoke emotional responses or connect to broader social and historical narratives. However, the metadata used to describe museum collections often doesn't reflect these types of user needs and search patterns.
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Why is it important?
The value of this research is that it suggests museums should rethink their documentation practices. Instead of just treating collections as informational data, museums should find ways to capture the social and emotional connections people want to make with the objects and images. This could make online museum collections much more useful and meaningful for a wide range of users.
Perspectives
It was great working on the collaborative project that led to this publication with the National Museums Scotland staff, as it was grounded on a real-life question/challenge that they face in their everyday work. My co-author, Cassy Kist, was the Co-I and main researcher in the project and we worked well bouncing ideas to each other and stepping back to place this case study in a wider context.
Maria Economou
University of Glasgow
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: User-centred collection metadata: from images as information to facilitating socio-affective connections, Journal of Documentation, September 2024, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/jd-02-2024-0031.
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