Searching Wartime Photograph Archive for Serious Leisure Purposes

Abstract

A survey of image information search goals, search tactics and what was looked at in the images was circulated among serious-leisure war historians. Also, we used the user engagement scale (UES), and a user success score were measured. Search goals included general and more specific goals. It is shown that despite the lack of full coverage of descriptions and metadata, users preferred mostly keyword searching. Surprisingly, general targets were popularly looked at the images, such as milieu or scenery. Participants gave high UES and varying success scores, but they were, in general, satisfied with their interactions. Serious leisure users are very engaged with their activities, which makes them tolerant to the possible system and indexing shortages. We discuss the findings and suggest research implications based on them.