Large Scale Analysis of Semantic and Temporal Aspects in Cultural Heritage Collection's Search

Cultural Heritage (CH) collections store and represent numerous historical objects such as images and documents, which are often of unique type and of high cultural and historical value. While the maintained objects are typically well-understood and analyzed, relatively less is known about what type of content is actually interesting to the searching users and how they find such content. These kinds of analyses could help us to understand for what purposes users use cultural heritage collections and could lead to user intent classification and understanding. In this paper we report the results of a large-scale exploratory analysis based on a 15-month long snapshot of query logs generated at the online portal of the National Library of France. Besides understanding the nature of content search in cultural heritage collections and digital libraries, the results of our study can be used for designing content recommendation systems and could help to improve time-aware search applications.