Inproceedings,
Resource Search and Discovery
Research Agenda for Networked Cultural Heritage, page 35--40. Santa Monica, CA, Getty Art History Information Program, (1996)
Abstract
Electronic technology has begun to change what information is available and how that
information is located and used. There are already a large number of electronic projects in the
humanities (see Getty, 1994). These changes are first related to remote access: Instead of
traveling to the sources of information, scholars use technology to bring information to them.
One important consequence of remote access is the broadening of access to students and other
novices who would not or could not bear the time and financial costs to travel to libraries,
museums, and research institutes, and who might not know what to look for once they arrived.
Secondly, electronic technology brings new genres of information that provide new challenges
for search and discovery (e.g., multimedia, interactive ephemera, etc.). The traditional problems
humanists have found in documenting and locating non-textual materials are exacerbated by
electronic technology. Thirdly, change is due to electronic tools and the strategies made possible
by electronic representations. The emphasis here is on tools and strategies for resource search
and discovery, although I will argue that we will continue to see closer integration with tools and
strategies for creating, using, and communicating information. This implies that creators who
choose to become more closely involved with consumers must take more responsibility for
documenting and directly placing their work.
In archives, libraries, and museums, search and discovery are facilitated by finding aides,
catalogs, and guides that organize the information space for information seekers. It is evident
that similar devices are appearing for electronic resources as well. An ongoing research
challenge is to discover appropriate representations for information and new search and
discovery tools and strategies that leverage the computational medium.
Search implies an effort to locate a known object; the information seeker has in mind specific
characteristics or properties of the object and these characteristics are used to specify and guide
search activity. Discovery implies an effort to explore some promising space for underspecified
or unknown objects; the information seeker has in mind general characteristics or properties that
outline an information space in which perceptual and cognitive powers are leveraged to examine
candidate objects (elsewhere I have distinguished search and discovery as analytical and
browsing information seeking strategies respectively, Marchionini, 1995). In general, discovery
emphasizes the location of the promising space (a collection or resource (e.g., CNI, in
preparation). Electronic technology provides new tools for each of these classes of strategies and
also blurs the traditional boundaries between them.
