The Great Unseen: Discoverability in Digitised Cultural Collections

Our research explores to what extent UK museums have made their collections available online and how researchers’ access item records. We aim to capture the current state of the field using over 3,000 UK museum websites, identifying online collections, hosting infrastructures, and the types of searches and browsing tools available. 

While the largest museums in the UK have sophisticated interfaces, many without the resources to customise software are ill-equipped to communicate the nuances of search to users. This is especially true of smaller institutions, which heavily rely on off-the-shelf solutions for collections' management. By looking beyond major institutions – to those without the resources for cutting edge digitisation projects and custom software – we attempt to understand levels of digital access across different types of organisations in the UK. As such, we have been able identify a wide variety of approaches museums’ have adopted towards explainability. During this ten-minute talk, we will pull examples of best practices from our broader dataset, asking how we might improve the transparency of search results and how the consequences of hidden algorithmic choices can be visualised.