The evaluation of ARCO: a lesson in curatorial competence and intuition with new technology

This article presents the results of the evaluation study of the Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects (ARCO) system which provides software and interface tools to museum curators for the development of virtual museum exhibitions for the World Wide Web or for information kiosks. The aim of the current research is to investigate how a virtual museum system is coping with the demands of museum curators, to examine the needs of virtual museum visitors, and to provide a set of criteria and guidelines for defining effective evaluation of such systems. Evaluation methods such as heuristic evaluation and walkthroughs were employed in the study in order to assess various components and interfaces of the system.