MuseumFinland Walkthrough

Welcome to MuseumFinland! This tutorial explains by means of a walkthrough the user interface of MuseumFinland (MuseoSuomi in Finnish), and what user needs its various functionalities fulfill.

This tutorial is organized as follows:

On each page, you will get a general English explanation of what is being explained in that section of the walkthrough, as well as what is visible on the page.

In addition to this, some major elements of the user interface not intimately involved in the walkthrough are annotated with context-sensitive English tooltips that can be viewed by placing the mouse over the element. These annotations give further information about the context of the walkthrough step as well as point to other functionalities of the user interface not covered in the walkthrough. Such elements can be identified by a dashed violet border.

The link you should be following in the walkthrough will be identified by a dashed red border. All other links take you away from this tutorial into the MuseumFinland system proper.

To quickly navigate the tutorial, use the > and < icons on the bottom right of each instruction page. To close this pop-up instruction window in order to view the user interface, click on the X icon. To re-read the pop-up instructions, click on the question mark icon ? that appears on the upper left corner of the user interface. Alternately, this instruction window is fully movable across the user interface just by clicking and dragging on it.

Now, click on the > icon to move on to step 1 of the walkthrough.

Step 1: The Main Page

This is the main page of the MuseumFinland portal. The primary search functionality of MusemFinland is based on the multi-facet search paradigm.

In multi-facet search, the content being searched is classified along multiple hierarchical views, and the search proceeds by selecting constraints on these views. In MuseumFinland, the museum items have been classified according to nine (9) different views, such as Artifact types (Esinetyyppi), Materials (Materiaali), and Manufacturers (Valmistaja).

The links in each view are the possible selectable constraints on the current level of the hierarchy (in the case of this main page, the top level). After each link the number is shown in parentheses indicating the number of hits in the result set if that category is selected as a further constraint. All selections leading to the empty result set have been prefiltered from the view! (This default option can be changed if the used wants to view all category choices.)

Having all the facets and their top level visible on the main page gives a new user a beneficial overview of what the collections of the portal actually contain, and hint at possible avenues of searching.

Now, let's say you are interested in various aspects of items used in Europe, but don't yet know more specifically which aspects. Click on Europe in the Place of Usage (Käyttöpaikka) Facet.