Abstract
Museums are increasing access to their collections via web-based interfaces, but are seeing high numbers of users looking at only one or two pages within 10 s and then leaving. To decrease this rate, a better understanding of the type of user who visits a museum web-site is required. Existing models for museum web-site users tend to focus on a small number of groups or provide little detail in their definitions of the groups. This paper presents the results of a large scale museum user survey in which data on a wide range of user characteristics was collected to provide well founded definitions for the user group’s motivations, tasks, engagement, and domain knowledge. The results highlight that the general public and non-professional users make up the majority of users and allow us to clearly define these two groups.
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reporting individual p-values and detailed \(\chi ^2\) statistics for grouped results exceeds the available space, but we intend to report them in detail in a future publication.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank National Museums Liverpool for giving us access to their users by allowing us to run the survey on their web-sites.
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Walsh, D., Hall, M., Clough, P., Foster, J. (2017). The Ghost in the Museum Website: Investigating the General Public’s Interactions with Museum Websites. In: Kamps, J., Tsakonas, G., Manolopoulos, Y., Iliadis, L., Karydis, I. (eds) Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. TPDL 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10450. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67008-9_34
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