Search-enhanced web information architecture for findability and discovery of archeological heritage: the MiBAC-DGA case study

The main aim of the new website of the Directorate-General for Antiquities (DGA), depending from the Italian Ministry of Culture, is promoting and valorizing the whole Italian archeological heritage with a wide offer of contents for different types of users. This implies (1) allowing user to quickly locate the desired information (2) fostering engaging exploratory experiences characterized by the pleasure of discovery and serendipity typical of edutainment applications. Traditional information architecture seems to not work properly for large websites, since the rigidity and complexity of the resulting hierarchical navigation structures penalizes both findability and discovery of information. A solution to this problem is a novel approach that seamlessly integrates info-architecture and faceted search, allowing to generate, according to users choices, dynamic navigation structures from the combination of several orthogonal classification criteria, without losing the overall “message” communicated by the website.