Scholarly Information Seeking Behaviour in the British Museum Online Collection

This paper presents a collaborative study between UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and the British Museum. It considers the use and information-seeking behaviour by scholars of the British Museum's Collection Online. The research focuses on user perspectives, search strategies and general use of museum digital resources, highlights the scholarly value of museum digital resources, and examines the existing structures of presentation and representation of the British Museum Collection Online for aiding academic information seeking. It provides an example of how, with detailed analysis of user survey data, museums can elucidate academic user groups' perceptions of museum collection information environments, and improve their understanding of how the functionality and usability of museum's digital collections aids individual's information searching.