A user study of the Singapore Memory Portal to derive a taxonomy for content organization

Many memory institutions have set up online portals to provide public access to their heritage collections. However, little is known about how such portal interfaces should be designed and how the content should be organized to support user se arching, browsing and learning. Many online cultural heritage portals adopt an organization scheme that is either content-oriented or institution-oriented rather than one that is user-oriented. This paper re ports an initial user study of a cultural heritage portal called Singapore Memory Portal that was set up in Singapore to collect people´s memories related to the history, culture, society, life and landscape of Singapore´s past. The study sought to find out users´ expectations of the content of the portal, how they search and browse the portal, and what they learn about particular historical or cultural topics from reading postings in the portal. The goal is to derive a taxonomy to organize the portals´ content for browsing and learning. For this initial study, 12 Singapor e citizens were interviewed, and asked to perform two search tasks on the portal and describe what they had learnt from the memory postings.