Contents:
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Background
- 3 Discovering Europeana through Wikipedia
- 3.1 Article augmentation
- 3.2 Paragraph augmentation
- 4 Evaluation
- 4.1 Paragraph augmentation evaluation
- 4.2 Log analysis
- 5 Conclusion and Future Work
- References
The authors of this paper state that, while more and more large digital cultural heritage collections have become available providing adequate search functionality for the expert user, this may not offer the best support for non-expert or novice users. Therefore they propose a novel mechanism for introducing new users to the items in an unknown, aggregated collection by allowing them to browse Wikipedia articles, a known collection. This method automatically augments the page(s) the user is viewing with items drawn from the cultural heritage collection, in this case-study Europeana. The Wikiana application displays the ranked results of a many-to-many mapping between Wikipedia articles and Europeana items. The first evaluation of the augmentation results reveals that further work is required to improve the appropriateness of the items used to augment the Wikipedia articles. At the same time a log analysis of Europeana browsing sessions showed that users introduced to Europeana through Wikiana were less likely to leave after viewing less than three items, providing clear indication that the here proposed approach for encouraging users to spend longer exploring items in Europeana is promising compared with the existing search provision. This research is done during the PATHS project.
This new approach to introduce novice users to your online AV-collection through a known online collection is an interesting idea for AV-archivists who wish to promote the browsing and viewing of the digitised resources in their archive. Wikiana is an example of a way to combine automatic indexing with facet searching in an aggregated portal.