Personalizing Access to Cultural Heritage Collections using Pathways

This paper discusses mechanisms for personalizing access to cultural heritage collections and suggests that paths or trails are a flexible and powerful model for this and could link with existing models of cognitive information behaviour. We also describe a European project called PATHS (Personalized Access To cultural Heritage Spaces) that aims to support information exploration and discovery through digital cultural heritage collections. This project aims to implement the user models discussed in this paper and provide a mechanism for users to create and share pathways through information spaces for learning and knowledge discovery. Personalized access to digital cultural heritage resources will be provided by adapting suggested routes to the requirements of individual users and groups, such as students/teachers, professional archivists and historians and scholars. Author