Organizing subject access to cultural heritage in Swedish online museums
| Date | 30 November 2021 |
| Pages | 211-247 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2021-0094 |
| Published date | 30 November 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Koraljka Golub,Pawel Michal Ziolkowski,Goran Zlodi |
Organizing subject access to
cultural heritage in Swedish
online museums
Koraljka Golub and Pawel Michal Ziolkowski
Linnaeus University, Vaxjo, Sweden, and
Goran Zlodi
Department of Communication and Information Sciences,
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Purpose –The study aims to paint a representative picture ofthe current state of search interfaces of Swedish
online museum collections, focussing on search functionalities with particular reference to subject searching, as
well as the use of controlled vocabularies, with the purpose of identifying which improvements of the search
interfaces are needed to ensure high-quality information retrieval for the end user.
Design/methodology/approach –In the first step, a set of 21 search interface criteria was identified,based
on related research and current standards in the domain of cultural heritage knowledge organization. Secondly,
a complete set of Swedish museums that provide online access to their collections was identified, comprising
nine cross-search services and 91 individual museums’websites. These 100 websites were each evaluated
against the 21 criteria, between 1 July and 31 August 2020.
Findings –Although many standards and guidelines are in place to ensure quality-controlled subject
indexing, which in turn support information retrieval of relevant resources (as individual or full search results),
the study shows that they are not broadly implemented, resulting in information retrieval failures for the end
user. The study also demonstrates a strong need for the implementation of controlled vocabularies in these
museums.
Originality/value –This study is a rare piece of research which examines subject searching in online
museums; the 21 search criteria and their use in the analysis of the complete set of online collections of a country
represents a considerable and unique contribution to the fields of knowledge organization and information
retrieval of cultural heritage. Its particular value lies inshowing how the needs of end users, many of which are
documented and reflected in international standards and guidelines, should be taken into account in designing
search tools for these museums; especially so in subject searching, which is the most complexand yet the most
common type of search. Mucheffort has been invested into digitizing cultural heritage collections, but access to
them is hindered by poor search functionality. This study identifies which are the most important aspects to
improve.
Keywords Digital cultural heritage, Online museums, Search interfaces, Subject searching, Controlled
vocabularies, Information retrieval, Image retrieval
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Ensuring online access to cultural heritage has been a key focus for many museums and
cultural heritage institutions over the past few decades. Finding information objects online is
Swedish online
museums
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© Koraljka Golub, Pawel Michal Ziolkowski and Goran Zlodi. Published by Emerald Publishing
Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone
may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and
non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full
terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
Many thanks to
Asa Larsson of the Swedish National Heritage Board for providing key insights into
some major aspects of the functionalities described in the Swedish heritage context. Special thanks to
anonymous reviewers whose detailed suggestions helped greatly improve the paper.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 5 May 2021
Revised 14 September 2021
Accepted 16 September 2021
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 78 No. 7, 2022
pp. 211-247
Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-05-2021-0094
directly dependent on the quality of search systems. In particular, searching by subject has
proven to be very common amongst end users despite being the most challenging type of
search due to the ambiguities of natural language. In order to help address this, subject
indexing practices and standards (e.g. the International Organization for Standardization,
1985) prescribe assigned indexing in which subject index terms are taken from controlled
vocabularies (such as thesauri or subject headings). These should also be applied in cross-
search systems where subject searching is even more complex due to the increased
heterogeneity of the collections. While international standards, policies and practices to
support this are in place, the question is to what degree they have been followed in existing
online services.
This study aims to investigate to what degree online web services providing access to
cultural heritage from Swedish museums support subject searching and retrieval. To this
end, a total of nine cross-search services and 91 Swedish museums’websites were evaluated
in the period 1 July to 31 August 2020. The online services were evaluated against a set of 21
criteria.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In the next section (2 Background),
the rationale for the study is presented, describing user requirements and the established
means to meet those requirements, referring to previous research and standards; this
includes the special challenges in subject analysis involving museum objects. Sampling
and methods are described in the third section (3 Methodology). The results are presented
and discussed with regard to their implications for search, access and interoperability in
Section 4 (Results) and summarized along with guidelines for future research in the final
section (5 Conclusion).
2. Background
2.1 Subject indexing and searching
Subject searching is common in online search systems such as library catalogues (Hider and
Liu, 2013;Hunter, 1991;Vill
en-Rueda et al., 2007), online museums (Baca, 2004;Liew, 2004),
bibliographic databases (Siegfried et al., 1993), repositories (Heery et al., 2006), discovery
services (Meadow and Meadow, 2012) and related digital search services (Patel et al., 2005). In
comparison to known item searching (e.g. queries for information objects whose title, author,
etc. is known beforehand), searching by subject is much more challenging. This is the result of
difficulties in formulating search queries with insufficient knowledge of the subject matter at
hand and/or insufficient knowledge of information searching (i.e. how to formulate a search
query to reflect the information need), as well as challenges arising from semantic
ambiguities inherent to natural language such as polysemy, homonymy and synonymy.
Terminological polysemy leads to the retrieval of irrelevant results: in large databases, this
may mean too many results to review manually. Synonymy presents challenges to effective
searching by placing the burden on the searcher, who would ideally need to include all
possible synonyms in a query in order to obtain a comprehensive set of results. Homonymy
leads to queries that often end up producing false positives.
In order to alleviate these problems, online search services should use assigned indexing, a
process in which subject terms are taken from established indexing systems such as subject
headings systems, thesauri and classification systems. These are designed to help the user
select a more specific concept to increase precision, a broader concept or related concepts to
increase recall, to help the user disambiguate between homonyms, or to discover which term
is best used to name a concept. In addition, hierarchical browsing of classification schemes
and other systems with hie rarchical structures c ould help the user improve th eir
understanding of their information requirements and to formulate their queries more
accurately.
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The international ISO indexing standard of 1985, which was confirmed in 2020
(International Organization for Standardization, 1985), prescribes general techniques for
subject indexing and clearly states that these are to be applied “by any agency in which
human indexers analyse the subjects of documents and express these subjects in indexing
terms”(International Organization for Standardization, 1985, p. 1), defining documents to be
“any item amenable to cataloguing or indexing, specifically including also non-print media
and three-dimensional objects or realia”. The standard gives a document-oriented definition
of manual subject indexing as a process involving three steps: (1) determining the subject
content of a document; (2) a conceptual analysis to decide which aspects of thecontent should
be represented; (3) translation of those concepts or aspects into a controlled vocabulary.
2.2 Special characteristics of subject indexing in museums
Will (1993) discusses how the principles of subject indexing museum objects are the same as
for printed publications. Indeed, to some extent, museum professionals who document
museum collections (custodians, documentalists, registrars) approach objects in the same
way as they approach documents (document-like objects, Caplan, 1995) when conducting
subject analysis and indexing, which allows them to share metadata standards and
documentation methodologies with archives and libraries.
However, when conducting subject analysis and indexing of museum objects in the broad
domain of cultural heritage, museum professionals need to take into account some special
characteristics of those objects, of which the key characteristics are described below.
2.2.1 Heterogeneity of museum object types and broad cultural heritage. The International
Council of Museums (ICOM Statutes, 2007, p. 2) defines a museum as “... a non-profit,
permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which
acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible
heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and
enjoyment”. Compared to archives and libraries, museums collect a vast number of
heterogeneous object types. Also, when we speak about museum objects, we predominantly
mean unique objects: well over 99% of all museum objects are unique objects/works, entities
that do not come as multiple copies or examples of manifestation of some work. With respect
to their subject, most museum objects do not even have narrative content, but are instead
designated by their material, form and function. Therefore, in subject analysis and indexing,
it is important to identify and represent not only motives depicted in an object (ofness) or what
an object/work is about (aboutness) but also what an object is per se (isness) and what its
function is.
2.2.2 Isness, aboutness and ofness. To further elaborate the concepts of isness,ofness and
aboutness, let us take Hagia Sophia (Istanbul) as an example in two different cataloguing
procedures:
(1) When cataloguing a photograph (the Object/work type is photograph) depicting
Hagia Sophia from 2020, the title should be “Hagia Sophia”representing work
(ofness), and one of the terms of the subject index should be “mosque”(aboutness).
(2) When cataloguing the Hagia Sophia itself as a built work, according to the book
Cataloguing Cultural Objects: a Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images
(CCO), three values should be recorded in the Object/work type element (Baca et al.,
2006, p. 57): “cathedral”,“mosque”and “museum”; the general subject term should be
“architecture”; and the Sspecific subject terms should be “cathedral”,“mosque”and
“museum”(isness), that is, the same as the Oobject/work type.
The function of the Hagia Sophia building has changed over time: It was built in 537 as
Byzantine Christian cathedral; in the 13th century it became the city’s Roman Catholic
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