Usability evaluation of an open-source environmental monitoring data dashboard for archivists

Cultural heritage archives engage in monitoring of environmental condition data, typically by employing “datalogger” devices and rudimentary data dashboard interfaces, to ensure collection preservation and avoid damaging environmental conditions, such as high temperature or humidity. Data dashboard interfaces are a popular means of efficiently monitoring complex, high-volume, and real-time data. While open-source software, in which the code may be modified as needed by individuals and/or communities, is widely used in the archives domain for collection management, the commercial environmental monitoring systems tend to be closed source and inflexible in use. The authors’ prior user-centered research with archivist practitioners has indicated many issues with the current commercial environmental monitoring systems and noted the potential for more flexible, open, and modern technology solutions. This research study explores the design and evaluation, through usability testing and heuristic evaluation, of an open-source data dashboard interface for archivists, with an emphasis on understanding the ability of current open-source tools in this realm to support archivists’ interface needs. Though the data dashboard interface was generally efficient and easy to use for archivists, there were several problems identified that require further development and evaluation, some of which may be more technically challenging than reasonable to expect from archivists. Several suggestions for the future directions this work may take are presented, which includes integration into existing popular open-sources systems currently developed by archivists.