Digital Collections (Art): “Who Are the Users of The Met’s Online Collection?”
From aby Elena Villaespesa, Digital Analyst at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute:
The Met’s online collection currently contains more than 450,000 digitized records — and is growing in number with each passing week.
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While it’s easy to say how many people visit the online collection — approximately 600,000 per month — the more challenging (and interesting) questions we at The Met hope to answer include: Who exactly are these users? What motivates them to come to our website? What are their needs and expectations when they browse the collection? Where are they coming from?
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I have been trying to answer these questions through user research I’ve conducted throughout 2017. The aim of this work was to get a better understanding of our users and to define a roadmap to improve the user experience on this important area of the website.
Read the Findings in the Complete Post by Elena Villaespesa on MetMuseum.org
UPDATE: Note: This post was also published on Medium.
Filed under: Digital Collections, Interactive Tools, News, Patrons and Users

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.