A Multistakeholder Approach to Value-Driven Co-Design of Recommender System Evaluation Metrics in Digital Archives

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multistakeholder framework for designing evaluation metrics in digital archive recommender systems, balancing diverse values and addressing domain-specific challenges.

Contribution

It presents a novel multistakeholder approach to develop tailored evaluation metrics for digital archives, considering domain-specific priorities and stakeholder concerns.

Findings

Stakeholder concerns align with discovery, interaction, integration, and impact stages.

Evaluation metrics tailored to each stage improve relevance and trust.

Framework is transferable to other domains emphasizing engagement over immediate consumption.

Abstract

This paper presents the first multistakeholder approach for translating diverse stakeholder values into an evaluation metric setup for Recommender Systems (RecSys) in digital archives. While commercial platforms mainly rely on engagement metrics, cultural heritage domains require frameworks that balance competing priorities among archivists, platform owners, researchers, and other stakeholders. To address this challenge, we conducted high-profile focus groups (5 groups x 5 persons) with upstream, provider, system, consumer, and downstream stakeholders, identifying value priorities across critical dimensions: visibility/representation, expertise adaptation, and transparency/trust. Our analysis shows that stakeholder concerns naturally align with four sequential research funnel stages: discovery, interaction, integration, and impact. The resulting evaluation setup addresses domain-specific challenges including collection representation imbalances, non-linear research patterns, and tensions between specialized expertise and broader accessibility. We propose directions for tailored metrics in each stage of this research journey, such as research path quality for discovery, contextual appropriateness for interaction, metadata-weighted relevance for integration, and cross-stakeholder value alignment for impact assessment. Our contributions extend beyond digital archives to the broader RecSys community, offering transferable evaluation approaches for domains where value emerges through sustained engagement rather than immediate consumption.