The Effects of Source Credibility Ratings in a Cultural Heritage Information Aggregator

State of the art web search applications allow the user to aggregate information from many sources. Because of this, users are confronted with having to assess the reliability of information from different sources. This paper reports on an empirical user study on the effect of displaying credibility ratings of multiple cultural heritage sources (e.g. museum websites, art blogs) on users' search performance and selection. The study investigated whether source credibility has an influence on users' search performance when they are confronted with only a few information sources or where there are many. The results of our online interactive study (n=122) show that by presenting the source credibility information explicitly, people's confidence in their selection of information significantly increases, even though it does not necessarily make search more time efficient. Additionally, we highlight credibility issues that are applicable beyond the cultural heritage domain, such as issues related to credibility measures and choice of visualization.