Assessing cultural heritage website quality

Effective search engines enable us to find items and collections online. Good ‘portal’ websites enhance our searches. By using the Significance criteria to determine the quality of the websites it harvests, the Australian Government’s Culture Portal delivers a particularly useful resource to collections researchers. This application demonstrates how significance can fulfil useful roles beyond the collecting organisation itself.

The Australian Cultural Portal

The Culture Portal provides access to over 4200 websites and 2.3 million pages about Australia’s culture through its ‘Bluey’ search engine. The Culture Portal selects and collects websites using a two-step selection process for websites based on an overarching assessment of significance. The selection of websites for assessment is done by both public submission and also thematic periodic harvesting. The thematic harvesting has contributed to the website collection, as it has encouraged the selection of significant websites, thereby providing access to significant Australian cultural information and activities.

Australian Government’s Culture Portal website collection policy is described at <http://www.culture.gov.au/policy/>.

First, the Culture Portal requires a website to meet essential technical and content criteria. Significance values are applied to the community benefit value of the website, including evidence of other people and organisations linking to it. Social, historical and research significance are commonly relevant significance criteria. Next, the Culture Portal uses the Significance method to determine the quality of websites for collection and promotion.

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[1] Culture Portal, Website collection policy, Australian Government, Canberra (n.d.), viewed 23 March 2009, <http://www.culture.gov.au/policy>.