Improving archaeologists' online archive experiences through user-centred design

Traditionally, the preservation of archaeological data has been limited by the cost of materials and the physical space required to store them, but for the last 20 years, increasing amounts of digital data have been generated and stored online. New techniques in digital photography and document scanning have dramatically increased the amount of data that can be retained in digital format, while at the same time reducing the physical cost of production and storage. Vast numbers of hand written notes, grey literature documents, images of assemblages, contexts, and artefacts have been made available online. However, accessing these repositories is not always straightforward. Superficial interaction design, sparsely populated metadata, and heterogeneous schemas may prevent users from working the data that they need within archaeological archives. In this article, we present the work of the Digging into Archaeological Data and Image Search Metadata project (DADAISM), a multidisciplinary project that draws together the work of researchers from the fields of archaeology, interaction design, image processing and text mining to create an interactive system that supports archaeologists in their tasks in online archives. By adopting a user-centred approach with techniques grounded in contextual design, we identified the phases of archaeologists work in online archives, which are distinctive to this user group. The insights from this work drove the design and evaluation of an interactive system that successfully integrates content-based image based retrieval and improved metadata searching to deliver a positive user experience when working with online archives.