Search and serendipity

The sting in the tail of all the work art institutions have been doing to digitise their collections is that the more stuff you have, the harder it is to find any single thing.

To my mind, collection sites have two core needs:

1. Search

This is for the people who know what they want, and want to get to it fast. Academic and professional image researchers may benefit from advanced search options. Experienced searchers might use filters, or other tools that allow them to expand and limit their searches easily (say by date, region, maker, materials, subject matter). It's also good to cater for people who get their search terms nearly-but-not-quite right (collin mcahon) with fuzzy search or suggested search options.

One of my favourite solutions to the search-right-now demand is the IMA's mega-menus: from absolutely any page on the site you can start a new collection search, but because the tool is tucked away in the site navigation, it doesn't have to be visually present on every page.



This blog post by the IMA's Charlie Moad explains the tools that have been put in place for collection searchers

2. Serendipity

This is for the people who want to know what you have, but don't know where to start. A search box is scary if your question is "what is there?".

Yesterday LACMA's Tom Drury blogged about findings from a survey of website visitors. People said they LACMA should let images rule the website (rather than the more proasaic info, like opening hours, that LACMA expected).

As a result, LACMA have introduced two new collection display techniques.

First up, collection splash pages - like this one for photography - provide entry points to works, blog posts, exhibitions and events related to different collection areas.



Second, a new collection homepage (in Flash) based on the idea of remixing. Clicking on an item in a tag cloud opens up three works grouped according to a word or short phrase.




The initial sets are been curated by staff, although visitors have been invited to email suggested sets in. Although the first thought I had was that this should work more like Flickr's galleries - with people being able to sign up and create their own groups for sharing or personal reference - on reflection I actually like the very lightweight implementation.

So beautiful it must be true

About a month ago I wrote about Multicolor search lab, a tool that let's you search Flickr images by selecting a colour palette.



Today I stumbled over another oldie-but-goodie, based on the Flickr API. retriever gives you a simple little tool to draw colour sketches, which are then matched to images in Flickr. Your drawings automatically generate urls: this was my attempt to get buildings at night time.

Again, imagine - just imagine - if you applied this search tool to your online collection. Is it for the hard core researcher? No. Is it an engrossing search experience? Yes.

Oh, go on

One of the things that interests me professionally is serendipity. How can you introduce play into search? How can you help people wade through the depths of your online collection is a way that's so elegant, so lightweight and so satisfying that they're unaware of effort, and only aware of the joy?

I played a while ago with Colr.org, which lets you build colour palettes out of selected images - the principle is, I think, that a colour image that's easy on the eye can be developed into an appealing colour palette.


This morning though I found Multicolr search lab and it's a whole new ballgame. Using Flickr's API, the tool lets you search nearly 3 million images by colour.





Now imagine that this was laid over an online collection; selecting shades of ochre, black and white would bring up McCahon, while jade and purple would give you Reuben Paterson. I could play with this thing for hours.

Images from top

Screenshot of a search on Multicolr

Colin McCahon, A grain of wheat, 1970. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Purchased 1978. New Zealand Lottery Grants Board. From the Colin McCahon website.

Reuben Paterson, Anticipating, 2007. Foil on canvas. From the Gow Langsford website.