Informing the Design of Web Interfaces to Museum Collections

Mary C. Dyson, Kevin Moran
2000 Museum Management and Curatorship  
Informing the Design of Web Interfaces to Museum Collections was selected which included those with a searchable database of records, or those which had attempted to cater for more than one user type. These sites were: 1. Hampshire Museums (www.hants.gov.uk/museums/catalog.html) 2. The Tate (www.tate.org.uk/home/index.htm) 3. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (www.nga.gov) 4. SCRAN (www.scran.ac.uk) 5. PhotoDisc (www.photodisc.com) 6. London Transport Museum (www.ltmuseum.co.uk) 7. The
more » ... ary of Virginia (www.lva.lib.va.us) General Methodology Three approaches to evaluation were incorporated into the study, and a twotier evaluation tool was created, consisting of a formal and informal level. This created a suitable structure, whilst also enabling additional elements to be added to provide the focus on databases and museums which are important features of this study. A method developed by Wallace (1995) and subsequently modified by Love and Feather (1998) for evaluating library special collections on the web was adapted for use as the formal approach. The less formal method, i.e. more descriptive, combined the Systematic Usability Evaluation (SUE) of Garzotto, Matera and Paolini (1998) with a framework proposed by Walker, Reynolds and Edwards (1999) . A key feature of the SUE is that it considers the specific nature of the application to be evaluated, rather than addressing only general interface features. In so doing, such factors as learnability and efficiency are considered. This method takes into account the structure of the information, alongside the presentation, and allows for discussion and interpretation of sites. From a basic outline, defined by general prompts, criteria were modified to suit the purpose of the evaluation. The Walker et al. (1999) method was initially developed to provide criteria for teachers to guide their choice of CD-ROMs for classroom use. Issues related to learning, access and navigation, typography, use of images and text were included in the current evaluation. Formal Evaluation The framework for this evaluation is summarised in Table 1 . General aspects of the whole site are considered (1a), before focusing on access to collections (1b). All of the main dimensions are broken down into further sub-dimensions and the outcome of the evaluation is a value assigned to each sub-dimension. In some cases, this will identify whether a feature is present or absent, while in others, the nature of the feature is described. The questions in the final column provide an interpretation of each of the sub-dimensions. The main dimensions can be summarised as: ¼ Institutional information providing general contextual information on the site ¼ Finding aids identifying whether or not the whole site can be searched and the means of searching
doi:10.1080/09647770000501804 fatcat:q6hw7ggcz5cdvaqro7pgvslqwa