Digital libraries and other information systems that access Cultural Heritage (CH) materials are becoming increasingly complex. They must often manage a diverse range of content from different CH institutions – such as libraries, museums, written and audiovisual archives – and have to provide access to them in a unified and coherent way. The content from CH institutions is often multilingual and multimedia (e.g. text, photographs, images, audio recordings, and videos), usually described with metadata in multiple formats and of different levels of complexity. CH institutions have different approaches to managing information and serve diverse user communities, often with specialized needs. This makes the meaning of “search and browse” quite different for users of a library or archive and non-specialist users may not be able to successfully retrieve relevant results or may be disoriented by the kind of results they obtain. Interaction patterns of users with CH information systems do not represent clear separated and isolated use cases but alternate with each other thus representing possible sequences of user interactions with a CH information system.
Invited talks will address further challenges and possibilities of alternative evaluation approaches from different perspectives or applications. Participants are asked to bring in statements dealing with the following topics: • • • use cases, evaluation needs, and best practices coming from field experience in the CH institutions; evaluation perspectives, frameworks, and alternative approaches in the digital library and digital curation fields; synergies and relationships between large-scale evaluation campaigns and CH evaluation.
The CHiC 2011 workshop aims at moving towards a systematic and large-scale evaluation of cultural heritage digital libraries and information access systems.