A Preliminary Investigation into the Search Behaviour of Users in a Collection of Digitized Broadcast Audio

An increasing number of large digitized audio-visual collections within digital humanities have recently been made available for users. Often access to digitized audio-visual collections is hampered by little and inconsistent metadata. This paper presents the preliminary findings from a study of the search log in a radio broadcast archive. Firstly, results in relation to the identified types of search terms show that the Programme listing category was the most frequently identified category followed by categories of Person and Subject. Secondly, users rarely apply advanced search operators but instead apply phrase or single word queries.