Helping museums describe their online collections in the words people actually use to search

What is it about?

Museums put images of their collections online so that anyone can explore them. But people often struggle to find what they're looking for, because museum staff describe objects in specialist terms, while the public searches using everyday words. This mismatch is known as the "semantic gap". We worked with National Museums Scotland, interviewing staff and running a workshop with people from across the organisation, to understand why this gap persists. We found that it isn't simply a technical problem or one team's responsibility. It is shaped by many connected factors: established ways of working and professional language, the systems and resources available, and how teams relate to one another. Drawing on a framework from education research called "practice architectures", we suggest two ways forward: more joined-up working across departments, and giving staff the agency to act as change makers who put users at the centre of how collections are described.

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Photo by sui Yun on Unsplash

Photo by sui Yun on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Museums are investing heavily in digitising their collections, yet much of this material stays hard to find because it is catalogued in language the public doesn't use. Research has already told us a lot about how users search. Far less has looked at why museums find it so hard to change how they describe their collections, and that is the question we take on here. Rather than blaming individual cataloguers or outdated systems, we show how professional habits, technology, resources and relationships between teams all reinforce one another to keep the semantic gap in place. Ours is the first study to apply "practice architectures", a framework from education research, to heritage documentation. This gives museums a practical way to see what is holding change back and where to act. The work is timely as museums turn to AI and other new tools to improve online access: our findings suggest that technology alone won't close the gap without changes to how organisations work. The lessons apply well beyond National Museums Scotland. They are relevant to collections managers, digital and documentation teams in museums, libraries and archives, and to researchers and students of digital museum systems and collections information.

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