Just Looking Around: Supporting Casual Users Initial Encounters with Digital Cultural Heritage

Cultural Heritage institutions have developed numerous ways of supporting visitors who have simply wandered in through the front door. However, for their digital collections, the CH institutions mostly provide a simple search-box, which supports the expert user, but which does not support the casual user who has just stumbled across the collection. These casual users frequently have no goal or topic in mind, but just want to have a look around what is available in the collection. For these users the blank search-box presents a significant obstacle, as without a goal or topic it is very difficult to formulate an appropriate query. In this paper we propose extending current exploratory search and information seeking models to support the initial interaction between the casual user and the collection.