Informing the Design of Web Interfaces to Museum Collections

Developing attractive and resourceful web applications for museums is taking place in a fast growing and changing environment. Museums contain rich sources of material in their collections, and there is particular interest in making this material available to a wide audience (Fahy and Sudbury, 1995). This information must be accessible and usable for the public (Donovan, 1997). The Rural History Centre at the University of Reading is currently working on a Designation Fund project to make their collections accessible and relevant to a wide range of public audiences, through the World Wide Web. The project involves cataloguing items into a database; creating digitised images of objects and photographs; authoring new text to promote new meanings and uses of the material; developing web interfaces to the database to meet the needs of different audiences: school children, general public, and experts; and evaluation of the access systems on samples of the target audiences. This paper focuses on a preparatory stage of the project which assessed the situation on the web with regard to access to collections in August 1999, including a review of literature on putting collections online and designing for different user groups and an evaluation of a small sample of web sites which share some features with the proposed site. The evaluation below describes the facilities offered by the sites and analyses their usability and presentation. The research has led to a set of recommendations and proposals based on the results of the evaluation and relevant literature. The guidance covers the information design of sites of this nature; how to integrate access to collections into the general site; ways of dealing with multiple users; the generation of story-based environments; and how the collections database might be searched and records returned.