Improving the impact of digital cultural heritage: system, content and users’ challenges

In the cultural domain, the impact of digital heritage on society has to be considered strategic as well as the intrinsic quality of resources themselves. The current tendencies tackle the GLAM (« Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums ») institutions to go over the conception of heritage as « beauty », valuable in itself, available just for few experts, to activate on the opposite pro-active collisions with communities’ needs, perceptions and choices. Thus, since the core elements for a digital cultural heritage project seem to be the content it makes available, the services it provides, and the users, it becomes crucial to be aware of user needs and expectations, whether they are explicit or not, to provide a good service. This contribution presents briefly the main issues and opportunities offered by organizing user studies of cultural digital products, with focus on the system, on the content and on users, the three poles of the Tryptich Interaction Framework.