JHU Museum Studies Spring 2010

Cataloguing Museum Collections

History, Trends, and Issues

Susan Chun

Week 4: Search

• Ways of finding: searching and browsing

• Search and cataloguing

• Search results: display and sort

• Processing cataloguing: vocabularies and thesauri

• Next-generation searching

How we find

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/

Search and cataloguing

Search and cataloguing

A digression on resource allocation

A digression on Google

Search results: display and sort

http://www.artsconnected.org/resource/list

Processing search and cataloguing terms: vocabularies

and thesauri

Next-generation searching tools

Reading and Assignment• Hargittai, E. (2007). The Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines: An

Introduction. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(3): 1 http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/hargittai.html

• Trant, J. (2006). Understanding Searches of an On-line Contemporary Art Museum Catalogue. A Preliminary Study, http://conference.archimuse.com/system/files/trantSearchTermAnalysis061220a.pdf

• Moad, C. (2010). What's in a Web Site: Collections Search, http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/02/09/whats-in-a-web-site-collections-search

• Matusiak, K. K. (2006). Information Seeking Behavior in Digital Image Collections: A Cognitive Approach, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(5), 479-488 (e-reserves)

• Hsieh-Yee, I. (2001). Research on Web search behavior. Library & Information Science Research, 23(2), 167-185 (e-reserves)

• Prepare a 1000-word comparison of the search interfaces and results from two different sites, one that you feel uses search to successfully and appropriately enable access to content, and another that fails in some way to do so. Consider the nature of the content being searched and the cataloguing--both public and hidden--that must be produced and indexed in order to execute the search. Think about the alternative searching tools we've considered this week: might some or all of them improve the search experience or results? Compare the ways in which the search results are presented and think about the user's experience of interacting with the results.

Discussions

• How do you search? Look closely at your own habits for searching and try to imagine how cataloguing would best support your searches. Share a search that returned a result that surprised you. Did you get more, or fewer, or different results than you expected? Can you suggest ways in which different search tools might have helped you to achieve a different result?

• Don’t forget the class glossary!