A User Study of the Singapore Memory Portal to Derive a Taxonomy for Content Organization

摘要

Many memory institutions have set up online portals to p rovide p ublic ac cess to th eir h eritage col lections. However, little is known about how such portal interfaces should be designed and how the content should be organized to support user se arching, br owsing and le arning. M any online c ultural heritage portals adopt an organi zation scheme that is either content-oriented or in stitution-oriented rath er th an on e th at is user-oriented. This p aper re ports an in itial u ser s tudy of a cultural heritage portal called Singapore Memory Portal that was set u p in S ingapore to collect people's memo ries related to the history, cu lture, s ociety, life a nd land scape of S ingapore's past. The study sought to find out users' expectations of the content of the portal, how they search and browse the portal, and what they learn about pa rticular historical or cultural topics from reading postings in t he portal. The g oal is to deriv e a taxonomy to organize the portals' content for browsing and learning. For this initial study, 12 Singapor e citizens were interviewed, and aske d to perform two search tasks on the portal and describe what they had learnt from the memory postings.