Displaying open cultural collections. Interface characteristics for effective cultural content aggregators

In recent years, cultural heritage institutions, such as museums and libraries, are introducing several strategies to enhance access to their collections. The digitization of extensive cultural collections and their release under open licences are fostering the creation of cultural content aggregators, namely Web platforms funded by non-profit organizations to converge digitized cultural collections from multiple cultural institutions. Cultural content aggregators, such as Europeana and Wikimedia Commons, aim to support scholars, writers and artists in their research, dissemination, and artistic activities. Although cultural content aggregators are adopting performative technologies and rigorous sharing methods, their user interfaces have several usability issues. Thus, part of the digitized heritage seems invisible to the end-user, as if it were a sort of digital depot. This paper adopts a research through design approach to investigate interface solutions that may foster access, navigation and use of digitized cultural objects within cultural content aggregators.