Keywords:
personalization, digital museum guide, information service system,
recommendation system, profiling, user control.
1.
Introduction
This paper addresses problems of personalization in the domain of digital publishing of
exhibition content in museums. Due to changes in conditions of financing and demographic
trends, museums are under severe pressure to attract higher numbers of visitors. At the same
time, a slow digital revolution is taking place. Collections and information are digitalized and
information systems are developed for internal and external access to all objects and written
knowledge about these. External access, that is, use of information systems by non-staff
interested parties, including potential visitors, has mostly been offered in the form of Web
pages. Of late, interest has grown in the use of information systems for in-house visitor
support during actual visits to exhibitions (e.g. Ciavarella, 2003; Knerr, 2000). Digital
information systems lend themselves to “narrowcasting”, for a heterogeneous audience,
which is expected to result in more visits, because traditional museum visitors constitute a
very select company only. Some form of customization, then, is needed.
There are of course numerous ways to customize exhibitions with help of IT, but in this
paper we concentrate on personalization using AI, especially on methods of profiling and on
personalized interaction styles. Important research on user experience with the subject has
been reported, especially dealing with adaptive websites and interface agents. For an
overview of the former, see Fink & Kobsa, 2000; Pazzani & Billsus, 2002; for the latter
Kühme, 1993; Maes, 1994). But no such research has been carried out on user experience of
museum visitor support systems. In this paper we report two studies testing visitor satisfaction
with a simulated personalization system, presenting different methods of personalization.
The research reported here was part of the development of SCALEX (Scalable Exhibition
Server), a project in the Fifth Framework program of the European Union. SCALEX is a toolkit
for preparing exhibitions with digital and personalized content presentations about the
2
Convention