Presentation given at the 2009 Society for American Archaeology meeting in Atlanta. Online publication with a very similar discussion to accompany these slides can be found here: http://csanet.org/newsletter/spring09/nls0902.html

1. Yes, it is all about You:
User Needs, Archaeology and Digital Data
Eric Kansa
UC Berkeley School of Information
Unless otherwise indicated, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution
3.0 License <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/>
Sarah Whitcher Kansa
The Alexandria Archive Institute

2. Orientation of Web Resources
Difficult
General / shallow
Specific / depth
Easy

3. Easy Difficult
General / shallow
Specific / depth
Orientation of Web Resources

4. Easy Difficult
General / shallow
Specific / depth
Most archaeological
databases
Most archaeological
databases
Orientation of Web Resources

5. Easy Difficult
General / shallow
Specific / depth
Most archaeological
databases
Most archaeological
databases
?
Orientation of Web Resources

6. A “good” user experience:
– Appealing
– Credible
– Easy to use
– Relevant
Studying User Needs
Image by Jeff Kubina via Flickr (CC-by license)
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/kubina/296367267/>

7. - Free, open
access
- Open source
- Citable
- Stable URLs
- All media &
data linked
- CC licenses
- Export / reuse

8. Open Context Development
2006
2007
2008
2009+
Validation of Data
Model, initial content
(10 project /
collections)

9. Open Context Development
2006
2007
2008
2009+
Enhance
performance,
interoperability
(RESTful services),
additional content
(2007 NEH award)

10. Open Context Development
2006
2007
2008
2009+
Expand content,
demonstrate
distributed services,
iterative design with
researchers
(2008 NEH/IMLS
award)

11. What Users Want
A typical user community…A typical user community…
(1) People, places,
things
(2) >50% “other”
What are people looking for? Are they finding it?
Is there something we can do about this?

15. What do Users Want?
• Whole project approach
• Literature, esp. gray
• Regional exploration
• Field system

16. What do Users Want?
• Whole project approach
• Literature, esp. gray
• Regional exploration
• Field system
ComprehensiveComprehensive
EfficientEfficient

17. Faceted Browse
• Search results
summarized as facets to
guide exploration

18. • Stable URI for every item to
citable human-readable
version and also machine-
readable version (Atom +
ArchaeoML)

19. Mashups for Cooperation
• Atom web services for data portability, distributed search, aggregation

20. Special Thanks
University of Chicago: OCHRE Project
Doris and Donald Fisher
Internet Archive (media repository services)
The United States National EndowmentThe United States National Endowment
for the Humanitiesfor the Humanities