An Evaluation of the Involvement of General Users in a Cultural Heritage Collection

Digital tools are becoming increasingly important research aid in the humanities. Scholars in different disciplines related to cultural heritage are currently exploiting digital resources at different levels, including the simple storage of digital acquisitions of cultural objects in an online collection, the 3D rendering of complete sites, the use of advanced search functions to browse multimedia collections, and the possibility of annotating the digital objects or personalizing interaction with the system. Once a digital system has been populated by researchers, a natural step is opening it to a wider public, which is enabled to access culturally relevant content. This extension poses a number of issues that are strictly related to the interest a specialized collection can raise. In this paper we present the results of a user study carried out over two years on two user groups: specialists in the domain and members of the general public.