I really enjoy reading this article. It touches upon many crucial questions I experienced when I browsed a museum webpage. While I wanted to learn more about the exbihits, the collections, I don’t know where to start or what keywords to enter in the search box. So I gave up very often. Just as Mitchell suggested, Search is ungenerous or inhospitable, in that it demands visitors who are unfamiliar with a collection to make the first move and enter a query.

I used to consider curated highlights or exhibitions, or the “most popular” holdings could be a good representation of a collection. Yet, Mitchell raised a interesting counterargument that while the list conveys the scope and diversity of a collection, it fails to represent the whole picture. The rich and exploratory features are missing.

MoMa Collection does a great job on showing first (not ask) and providing a rich overview of the collection. It shows 86.234 out of 98.076 works online. Yet, it fails to provide good samples. As the work is organized by author’s name, visitors need to scroll a whole page of David Horvitz’s work before browsing works from other artists. There is no other salient information that encourages visitors to further explore on the home page. When visitors click one particular work, they can see detailed information about the work, the author’s other work, and many other relevant information. So that the high-quality primary content is reached. In general, I think MoMA collection creates a rich interface to represent large, diverse collections, yet the display is not compact and browsable enough.