ARCHIVES ONLINE FOR USERS: TOWARDS A USER-CENTERED QUALITY MODEL INCLUDING A COMPARATIVE EVALUATION FRAMEWORK FOR USER STUDIES

The traditional paradigm of archival mediation had to come to grips with the new web environment: if guides, inventories and indexes act as mediation tools between what is inside archives and whoever needs to access them, traditional archival finding aids are not ready to be published on the web, where users are basically free from any mediation. From the final users’ point of view, archival informative mediation on the web is suffering much more than what archivists usually accept. The starting point for rethinking the archival mediation paradgim could be the principle that “output is not input”, and the compliance to current archival standards is a necessary condition, but not sufficient to guarantee the usability of archives online. Rarely archival projects organize specific user studies to finalize language, interfaces and architectures of the new environments. The paper, before proposing some first elements to guide the drawing of a new model (built to ensure quality to archives online in terms of user needs, experience and satisfaction), presents the case study of a huge archival portal based on an user-centered approach. In particular, if during the formative phase, the portal prototype has been tested adopting a user studies research, now, when the service is active, it is possible to integrate and compare those data with the web analytics results.