Browsing in Hypermedia Exhibits
    Aug.1999


    Principle researchers: Joan C. Nordbotten, Associate Professor
    Svein Nordbotten, Professor.
    Department of Information Science,
    University of Bergen, Bergen, NORWAY


    Keywords: usage profiles, museum exhibits, hypermedia, information dissemination
    Publications


    Project description:
      We've studied the usage characteristics of a small, multi theme, hypermedia exhibit of social science research projects ranging from the statistical system of the Incas to current financial networks in Norway. The exhibit was constructed as part of the University of Bergen's 50th anniversary celebration, which opened in August 1996 at the Museum for Natural Sciences. It was installed using a WebSite server and Netscape browser on a stand-alone PC with a touch screen. An English, www version of the exhibit is available at http://129.177.34.238/eng_museum/00sv-ut.htm.

      Our principle research questions concern how exhibit visitors navigate within a multi-theme exhibit. Particularly

      • How (in which sequence) themes are selected.
      • How many pages are selected for theme and exhibit viewing.
      • How much time is spent on pages, themes, and the exhibit.
      • Is page selection serial or by associative (embedded) links.
      • Can viewing patterns be associated with demographic groups.

      The table below gives a brief overview of 1027 exhibit sessions, gathered from the log data for 3 populations: school students (331), adults/tourists (374), and social science faculty and students (322). Theme sessions are defined as "exhibit sessions including at least one theme (project) page".

      Note that about 35% of the exhibit sessions contained only index pages, indicating that nothing of interest was found, or Norwegian was not legible in the 1st and 2nd populations. Some of these sessions were also due to the daily control that the exhibit was operative.

      Population Theme sessions % Themes/session Avg.pages/session Avg.session time (seconds)
      1 67 1.1 6 45
      2 50 1.6 7 55
      3 78 1.4 8 79

      In our study, sessions were short in both time spent and number of pages selected. As expected, interest in the exhibit increased in the older populations and for the faculty members whose themes were represented in the exhibit. For all groups,

      • topic selection was highly correlated (>0.8) with index placement.
      • less than 50%, on average, selected more than 3 pages of a topic, and
      • serial page selection dominated, though about 45% of the faculty and student viewers did use embedded links for page selection.


    Publications
      • Nordbotten, J.C. and S.Nordbotten. Information Gathering from Hypermedia Databases Proc. Int'l Conference on Human Computer Interaction, HCI'99, Munich, Aug. 22-27,1999.
      • Nordbotten, J.C. and S.Nordbotten. Search Patterns in Hypertext Exhibits. Proc. HICSS 32, Hawaii International Confr. on System Sciences, Jan. 4-9. IEEE ISBN 0-7695-0001-3, 1999.
      • Nordbotten, J.C. and S.Nordbotten. Information dissemination using Hypertext Exhibit. Norsk tidsskrift for Bibliotekforskning, Nr.10, 1997, 76-90. Abstract


    Current related research activities
      The museum project is one of several in the Group for Interface Research at the Department of Information Science, University of Bergen. Other, related projects include:
      • DMP, Data model perception
      • SIS, Statistical Information Systems


    For more information e-mail: Joan C. Nordbotten or Svein Nordbotten