“Searching for inspiration”: User needs and search architecture in Europeana collections

Abstract

Drawing upon research and current development work at Europeana, this paper discusses search functionality in the Cultural Heritage sector, focusing in particular on the question of ‘inspiration-oriented’ search, in which users seek out previously-unknown items to serve as creative stimulus. Inspiration-oriented search is identified as a variant of the more widely-studied problem of serendipitous retrieval, and defined as an information-seeking behavior in which users consciously search for items that are related to known items in ways that are recognizable once seen, but that are nevertheless unpredictable at search-time. Various strategies for the maximization of both the recognisability and unpredictability of related items are then described, including user-interface and user-experience changes and the reconceptualization of datastores as knowledge graphs. Directions for further research are then outlined – including, most importantly, possible metrics for inspiration-oriented search and their potential for use in machine-learning ranking frameworks.