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

Abstract. 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 func-tions. 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.