Promoting user engagement with digital cultural heritage collections

Abstract

In the context of cooperating in a project whose central aim has been the production of a corpus agnostic research environment supporting access to and exploitation of digital cultural heritage collections, we have worked towards promoting user engagement with the collections. The aim of this paper is to present the methods and the solutions that have been envisaged and implemented to engage a diversified range of users with digital collections. Innovative solutions to stimulate and enhance user engagement have been achieved through a sustained and broad-based involvement of different cohorts of users. In particular, we propose the use of narratives to support and guide users within the collection and present them the main available tools. In moving beyond the specialized, search-based and stereotyped norm, the environment that we have contributed to developing offers a new approach for accessing and interacting with cultural heritage collections. It shows the value of an adaptive interface that dynamically responds to support the user, whatever his or her level of experience with digital environments or familiarity with the content may be.