i've recently taken a look at a year's worth of search log data from the Guggenheim Collection on-line -- a pilot study for some work within the steve.museum project. I've attached a draft paper to this post -- comments are welcome! It's still rough in spots, but I need to step back.

One of our premises in discussing folksonomy in the museum is that allowing users to tag collections will improve their retrivability... but surprisingly, we know almost nothing about what searchers of museum collections really do. i couldn't find a single serious IR study in the museum domain. There's lots of literature about what we 'should' do, how standards will help and why controlled vocabularly is really important, with almost no evidence to support those claims. We need to look hard at the data.

Notable findings in the Guggenheim data:

• artists names are searched significantly more often than other things (comprising 63% of searches made more than 10 times)
• the usage curve strongly matched the academic year and the days of the week (with significant dips on weekends)
• the exhibition program does influence searches (searches related to the theme of a show increase during its time on view)
• search terms are very diverse. the most popular search term 'picasso' made up only 2.8% of searches; the curve of term distribution was very steep and the tail exceptionally long
• the characteristics of the tail differ from the 'head' of the curve; infrequent searches were more likely to be for subject-related topics, and combinations of categories
• spelling errors accounted for 36% of unsuccessful searches, but half (50%) of the unsuccessful artist’s name searches failed because of a spelling error.

The study of the search data left me wanting to know more about the users of this on-line collection. Their penchant for the specific certainly doesn't match the level of interest common in the browsing museum visitor...but then the collection search function encouraged the use of a specific query term. I didn't have data for the 'Directories' that the Guggenheim also offers, so couldn't compare searching to list-based browsing behaviour. It may be that browsing behaviour is supported elsewhere.

It may also be that the since 20th century artistic production and discourse emphasizes the individual, searching the Guggenheim collection on-line reflects the focus of modern art-making and critical theory. Or it may be that since artists name searches are most likely to be successful, these are the kinds of searches that users are most likely to make.

We need to know more about what users really search for, and how that behaviour differs in different types of museums. Then we can make some informed decisions about how to facilitate access, both to individual collections and to aggregated collections data.

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