Accessing Digital Cultural Heritage Information: Users vs Institutional Perspectives of Metadata and Searching.

A controlled experiment with ten participants, involving two tasks and a selected set of digital cultural heritage content, explored (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 collection management standards like Spectrum encourage a variety of different characteristics 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 considered 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 information. However, a process is needed for institutions to form a concrete understanding of who their target users are before developing features and designs to suit their specific needs and interests.