Welcome

This is the project workspace for Searching Museum Collections, a research project that examines the ways in which users query museum collections online. Our initial research will focus on search logs from ARTstor (a library of images from museums and other heritage collections) representing more than 10 million searches. Once we have established methods for interrogating and analyzing the ARTstor search logs, we will broaden our scope to include logs from other aggregated resources (including the AMICA Library and Europeana) and logs of individual museum websites. Although much of our work will be documented in this public wiki, we also expect to issue formal findings--including analysis, conclusions, and best practices for logging museum searches--in Fall 2010.

About the Project

The project is an informal collaboration of heritage professionals and researchers. Our first meeting, in November 2009, established the project goals and outputs, as well as an initial set of research questions that we hope to investigate. Please feel free to explore the wiki to learn more about our plans, activities, and about the research itself. Note that write access to the wiki is limited to project team members. We do, however, welcome comments and ideas from anyone who may be interested in the work. You can contact us via the "Contact the owner" link at the bottom of this page.

FrontPage

• Goals
• Outputs

Participants

• Introductions

Research

• Questions
• Conclusions

Data

• Data Elements
• Data Set Description: ARTStor
• Data Downloads (restricted)
• Setting Up Google Analytics 

Bibliography

• Additional References
• Annotated Bibliography
• Literature Review/Environmental Scan

Schedule and Logistics

• To Do
• Search Log Camp, MCN Portland (11-11-09)

Acknowledgments

The project team is grateful to ARTstor for agreeing to share their search logs with us. Members of the ARTstor team who have supported the work include Louise Kelly, Senior Decision Support Analyst; Eric Li, Consultant; Gretchen Wagner, Secretary and Director of Administration; Shalimar White, Collection Development Associate; and William Ying, Chief Information Officer. We look forward to working with logs provided by other contributors and participants, including the AMICA Library of Art Museum Images from Cartography Associates, and others. We would also like to acknowledge the support of the Museum Computer Network, and the past work of the entire team of Steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project, whose tools for and discussions about term processing and analysis have informed our project planning in many ways.