Information Seeking Behavior in Digital Image Collections: A Cognitive Approach by Krystyna K. Matusiak Available online 25 July 2006 Presents the results of a qualitative study that focuses on search patterns of college students and community users interacting with a digital image collection. The study finds a distinct difference between the two groups of users and examines the role of mental models in information seeking behavior in digital libraries. INTRODUCTION Digital image collections offer users an unprecedented oppor- tunity to easily access unique visual resources held at libraries and museums. In addition to online access, digitized collections also provide enriched intellectual control of images, multiple points of access, and enhanced image manipulation. Libraries invested a considerable amount of indexing efforts in creating descriptive metadata to facilitate image discovery in the digital environment. The number of digital image collections created by libraries, museums, and historical societies increased significantly in the last decade and became an important component of the digital library landscape. Many users take advantage of ease of access and choose to view images in the online environment instead of coming to libraries. Digital image collections also attract new, non-traditional and remote users, who otherwise would not have a chance to discover them. The nature of user experience in the digital environment appears to be quite different from looking through archival boxes or folders, yet there has been very little research on the use of digital image collections, particularly on user behavior in the process of seeking images. Rasmussen emphasizes that ‘‘relatively little is known about information-seeking behavior as it relates to images.’’ 1 Digital image collections pose a new set of challenges to collection designers as ambiguous subject matter and visual attributes of pictures have to be translated into textual descriptors to provide access points for resource discovery. The research on digital image collections, therefore, has to begin with an understanding of how people search for images, how subject-indexing supports image retrieval, and how images are used. 2 This article presents the results of a qualitative study examining user information seeking behavior in a digital image collection and interprets them in light of selected concepts of cognitive psychology. The study was conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries using ‘‘Milwaukee Neighborhoods: Photos and Maps 1885–1992’’ as a test collection. ‘‘The nature of user experience in the digital environment appears to be quite different from looking through archival boxes or folders’’ Krystyna K. Matusiak is Digital Collections Librarian, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, 2311 E. Hartford Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA bkkm@uwm.eduN. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 32, Number 5, pages 479–488 September 2006 479