Towards Generous Interfaces for Archival Collections Blog Post
After a brief overview of Whitelaws’ definition of Generous Interfaces, I have gained a new insight into the format of different search pages, and how some websites appeared more useful than others. Generosity, although an odd word to use for an agent or tool that inherently serves the user, is an accurate measurement to judge search engines. Breaking down her arguments into layman’s terms, an interface is considered generous if it makes evident the format,history, or overview of its data before the user enters a query to be searched. While analyzing the front page of Europena, Europe’s digital cultural heritage, I gained a fundamental understanding of what the possible data types were, as well as possible queries that would make sense given the format. The page contained the search bar, with a faceted theme that included possible categories within the dataset, as well as articles that are shown as example data that is depicted through the search engine. The overview of the page essentially acted as a guide to how to use it, which in theory, fits the definition of a generous search engine.