What is Adaptive Interfaces

Personal digital collections systems, which encourage visitors to museum websites to create their own personal collections out of a museum’s online collections, are the latest trend in personalization technologies for museums and other cultural heritage organizations. This chapter explores the development, implementation, and evaluation of different types of personal digital collection interfaces on museum websites, from simple bookmarking applications to sophisticated tools that support high levels of interactivity and the sharing of collections. It examines the potential impact of these interfaces on the relationship between museums and their online visitors, explores the possible benefits of involving users as co-creators of digital cultural heritage, and offers an analysis of future research directions and best practices for system design, presenting lessons learned from more than a decade of design and development of personal digital collections systems on museum websites.