Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage: A Guide to Rich‐prospect Browsing

Citation

Note, M. (2012), "Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage: A Guide to Rich‐prospect Browsing", Online Information Review, Vol. 36 No. 1, pp. 146-147. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2012.36.1.146.5

In Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage: A Guide to Rich‐prospect Browsing, authors Stan Ruecker (University of Alberta), Milena Radzikowska, (Mount Royal University, Calgary) and Stéfan Sinclair (McMaster University) explore rich‐prospect browsers, which they describe as “visual representation[s] of every item in a given collection, combined with tools for manipulating the display[s]”.

Rich prospect browsing commences with a view of the entire collection where each item is individually recognisable through an expressive depiction, such as an image. To organise the arrangement, navigational tools traverse the collection, and sorting or grouping tools emerge from whatever data is available. Users then mark the representations that interest them and explore the collection further through metadata connections. Unlike boolean searching, rich‐prospect browsing permits nuanced searches by, for example, allowing users to determine the number of criteria used, the number of items represented, and the types of items represented. While many digital collections have inadequate interfaces for online research activities or are based on traditional linear textual reading, rich‐prospect browsers offer a new approach to collection interaction by allowing flexible ways to scan information, discover data patterns and form hypotheses.

The authors state that these types of interfaces require conditions that encompass the majority of digital cultural heritage collections, ‘where the collections are of the right size (that is, hundreds or thousands of items, but typically fewer than tens of thousands), have the right conformation (that is, with rich metadata), and are readily represented at the item level’. The paradigms behind rich‐prospect browsers reflect theories that have emerged over decades of interface and information design research.

Design is the crux of rich‐prospect browsing. Creating enhanced interfaces for digital collections requires the testing of various design models, adding to the understanding of both the potential and the limitations inherent in rich‐prospect browsing. The authors write, “Our perspective here is … experimental prototype design where we try to allow the design and [Human‐Computer Interaction] literature (among others) to inform the process of iteratively developing prototypes)”. They continue, “Although for us design is a research area in its own right, we also believe that the time and effort needed to design interfaces are a sound investment, one that seems undervalued in many academic projects”. The book explores design transferability, as many of the design approaches are adaptable to specific projects, which is especially constructive for readers interested in their own rich‐prospect browsing projects.

Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage: A Guide to Rich‐prospect Browsing provides insights into using design to represent cultural knowledge online. As the authors demonstrate, rich prospect browsing provides researchers with a better means of organising information than conventional interfaces. My only disappointment is that many of the projects discussed in the book lack publicly accessible interfaces in which I could explore the collections myself and come to my own conclusions about their effectiveness; perhaps these restrictions speak to the cutting edge of the authors' field of research. With that in mind, library and information scientists, digital humanists, visual communication designers and human‐computer interaction specialists are advised to read this book to improve their efforts in the pursuance of cultural knowledge in the future.