A Framework for Classifying Interactions in Cultural Heritage Information Systems

With the mass digitization of cultural heritage and the increase of people accessing the digitized memory objects, it becomes crucial to develop meaningful interaction patterns in cultural heritage information systems. This explorative study is based on an investigation of 50 websites from the cultural heritage domain. It derives a framework for classifying user interactions with digital cultural heritage. The framework has two dimensions; the first one is a classification of the interactions and the second one describes their degree of complexity. The strength of this framework is the ability to compare complexity, scope and purpose of interactions across different websites while offering a meaningful vocabulary for discussing different interaction features.