Exploratory Search in an Audio-Visual Archive: Evaluating a Professional Search Tool for Non-Professional Users

As archives are opening up and publishing their content online, the general public can now directly access archive collections. To support access, archives typically provide the public with their internal search tools that were originally intended for professional archivists. We conduct a small-scale user study where non-professionals perform exploratory search tasks with a search tool originally developed for media professionals and archivists in an audio visual archive. We evaluate the tool using objective and subjective measures and find that non-professionals find the search interface difficult to use in terms of both. Analysis of search behavior shows that non-professionals often visiting the description page of individual items in a result list are more successful on search tasks than those who visit fewer pages. A more direct presentation of entities present in the metadata fields of items in a result list can be beneficial for non-professional users on exploratory search tasks.