6 September 2026
It is no surprise that the global rise of the Internet since the late 1990s has ushered in the era of online, digitized collections from art museums around the world. From the expansive collections housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris to the comparatively smaller collections housed at institutions such as the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, NC, art museums have increasingly digitized their collections to make them more accessible to the public. But are these collections really more accessible? Who is the “public” that are using these online collections? Are some collections more accessible to members of the public with a higher prior knowledge of art and art history than others?
For this week’s blog post, I am going to take a deep-dive into Michael Whitelaw’s “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections”1, a 2015 article that examines the user interfaces (UI) of various online digital collections for usability. More specifically, I will examine a handful of online collections in 2026 using the same metrics Whitelaw uses in determining the user-friendliness of his chosen collections.
At the conclusion of the article, Whitelaw supports what he refers to as “generous spaces” in UI design, defining them as providing “rich, navigable representations of large digital collections; they invite exploration and support browsing, using overviews to establish context and maintain orientation while revealing detail at multiple scales.”2 In other words, the most effective digital collections are paired with UIs that are a middle-ground for scholarly research and casual browsing. Generous spaces are ones that prioritize both collection search-ability and spontaneous discoveries, catering to a wide array of potential online users.
As an art historian, I typically visit an online collection with a specific work in mind, therefore using the collection to find that item. Rarely do I visit an online collection to browse casually. I open up the webpage, find the search feature, and type in the information I already know about the work I am searching for. Any results beyond this work are purely superfluous in my search, and many times non-related objects actively hinder my search if my search parameters are not detailed enough. For example, when I was working on a project on the statuette of Juno housed at the Ackland Art Museum, I often consulted the museum’s “eMuseum” to double-check information. The collection UI opens up to its main page, which is headed by a search box and a “View All Works” button. As someone with a specific object in mind, I usually just typed “statuette of Juno” into the search box and it eMuseum returned the object I was looking for.
But this isn’t the case in all instances. As someone who works with ancient Mediterranean antiquities, many objects lack official titles and are instead given descriptive names such as “Marble Portrait of a Young Woman” or “Monumental Hydria”. These names make it difficult to search for specific objects, since the names are more subjective than Leonard di Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” or more recent works of art. If I search “Statue of Woman” on the Met’s online collection, I get nearly 2,500 results without adding any additional filters or terms.
So what actually makes a digital collection a “generous space”? Despite my apparent bashing of the Met’s online collection above, it actually does a reasonable job at catering to both search-focused users and browsing-focused users. On the collection’s homepage, users are given the option to search the collection via a standardized search bar (1) or browse the collection in a variety of ways. The Met consolidated its highlights under the “Highlights” tag (2) and also gives the options to search for only images in the public domain (3) for artists and other users interested in using their images for reproduction or re-imagination. Moreover, users can browse by individual subject collection (4)—which for the Met groups objects by the room or wing of the building they are located in.
The Ackland’s eMuseum is less of a generous space than the Met’s, as it lacks a clear browsing feature beyond dumping the user into a “View All Works” spaces. For the Ackland, this directs users to more than 22,000 works of art that require additional filtering—an overwhelming experience for many casual browsers. Of course, the Ackland has a much smaller online collection than the Met (~22,000 works vs ~535,000 works) and fewer resources to work with to develop their digital platform.
With the previous online collections explored and critiqued, it is time for me to turn your attention to one of my favorite digital collections: the Beazley Archive. Run by the Classical Art Research Centre (CARC) at the University of Oxford, the Beazley Archive is an online database version of Sir John Beazley’s classifications of Greek vase painting, which were published as volumes in 19423 and 19564. The database started as a visual companion to Beazley’s volumes, since they originally contained no images.
Today, the database holds more than 137,000 individual records of Greek vases which are accessible through a variety of search formats. The original search feature—dubbed “Traditional Search”—is an HTML-based search engine predominantly used by older academics. There is no room for casual browsing in this search feature, as the tool requires specific information to locate vases.
Beyond this feature, “Advanced Search” is more geared towards search-ability and “Basic Search” is geared towards browse-ability. “Advanced Search” provides more options for filters than “Basic Search” does, allowing those with more knowledge of the online collection’s holdings to navigate for specific objects. “Basic Search” presents the user with eight options for an initial filter, allowing them to narrow down the 137,000 options by a single metric rather than a series of them.
Once an initial filter is applied, the Beazley Archive returns a page of images, allowing the user to filter through them by visual marker rather than metadata information. Below is an example search for vases in the hydria shape using the Simple Search. In this case, “Shape” was selected as the category from the list of options (see above, left) and “hydria” was selected as the shape. There were 3,418 results for hydriai in the Beazley Archive.
If these search options seem like too much for a user, the Beazley Archive also has a “Show a sample vase” button that will randomly generate a record from their collection, giving users a taste of the collection’s holdings. This button can be pressed as many times as desired, generating a different vase each time.
- Michael Whitelaw. “Generous Interfaces for Digital Cultural Collections.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 1 (2015). ↩︎
- Whitelaw, paragraph 46. ↩︎
- John Beazley. Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters. Clarendon Press. 1942. ↩︎
- John Beazley. Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters. Clarendon Press. 1956. ↩︎
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