Sheffield Submission to the CHiC Interactive Task: Exploring Digital Cultural Heritage

The Cultural Heritage in CLEF 2013 (CHiC) interactive task focused on acquiring and analysing interactive information retrieval (IIR) behaviour in a Digital Cultural Heritage collection. The University of Sheffield contributed 120 on-line and 20 in-lab participants to this task. The results of both the on-line and in-lab experiments strongly indicate that when faced with a new, unfamiliar collection and an open-ended task, participants will spend more time using the category hierarchy for exploration, than the search box. However, analysis of the the number of items the on-line participants view in detail and then saved to their workspace indicates that the two access methods fulfil different functions. From this we conclude that the categories are seemingly there to support the development of an initial overview over the collection, while the search is used to locate things in a more focused manner.