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This study aims to present a meta-analysis of the use of serious educational games in museums. The analysis is based on a critical literature review that maps educational roles of museums against serious educational games used in support of those roles. The meta-analysis focuses on the specific context of informal learning in museums.

The research design presented in this study is based on a meta-analysis research design that consists of a critical literature review, a multi-matrix representation of findings of the literature review and a conceptual visualization of the multidisciplinary area of the usage of serious games in support of educational roles in museums.

Clear and detailed categorizations of educational roles and serious games types for informal learning are presented. These are followed by matching these educational roles with published reports of the use of serious games within museums. The study concludes with observations and a conceptual map of the design of serious games for museums.

This study presents the first meta-analysis of research in this emergent multidisciplinary field. It will help serious game designers, museum educators and educational practitioners to make decisions regarding the choice of game type, customization and content design to support informal learning in the specific context of museum educational activities.

The contribution explores the methodology, strategies and activities of inter-institutional partnership among university, school, territory initiated by the Degree Courses in Primary Education Sciences of the University of L’Aquila. It illustrates the experiences of an active partnership undertaken at the five-year, single-cycle Degree Course after the reform introduced in Italy by the law 249 of September 2010 aimed at encouraging local development in a national and international perspective (Bologna Process, 1999). These activities focus on the need to strengthen the cultural and professional profile of future teachers through curricular and extracurricular activities involving the use of cultural heritage goods, tangible and intangible, of the territory. The aim is to renew methodological approaches to ‘science teaching’ through the use of appropriate technologies that make it possible to realize the process of teaching-learning adequate to provide the multi-lettered of the XXI Century with sets of skills and knowledge more and more updated. The contribution focuses, in particular, on the project titled ‘Museum in … click! – Cognitive processes and new technologies applied to archaeological heritage in museums for cultural fruition qualitatively appreciable’. This project involved University, Superintendence of Archaeological Heritage (SAH) of Abruzzo and local schools in a partnership where teachers and students from schools of the territory were busy in direct training to build educational proposals and multimedia products for their peers to improve the quality of use of cultural goods involved. The project, funded by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism – Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo (MIBACT), provides a good example of practices within a partnership model that feeds a teaching system where the different skills of the stakeholders interact inside a common cultural area pursuing the same goals.

The purpose of this project is to study how art museum practitioners use current image‐indexing practices and services to retrieve images from museum collections. The investigation examines several areas, including image needs, information‐seeking strategies, information queries, search functions, display formats, and human‐computer interaction.

The six participating museums are in Washington, DC, and the states of California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio. The investigator interviewed 35 museum practitioners in various departments at the six museums about their image sources, search behaviors, and use of images.

Wide variations and internal conflicts exist among curators, IT staff, slide librarians, registrars' offices, educational staff, faculty, and photographers. Museum practitioners' knowledge and expertise should inform the design and presentation of digital images of museum collections as well as the images' relationships with the construction of digital museums.

Digital technologies have pushed museum practitioners to initiate organizational changes to accommodate the effects of technology. Museums' digital images and their relevant information are the foundation of the digital museums. Museums must incorporate a re‐examination of their roles in the digital age. An ideal digital museum is not just an online version of the museum, if that is achievable, or an online catalog of museum collections with pictures. It is also a resource that must be founded upon museum practitioners' expertise and professional practices.

As content acquisition is often conceived of as the primary goal of a museum visit, advice for social studies teachers on making the most of field trips primarily focuses on ways to increase the information absorbed by students. Yet, research in museum studies provides ample evidence for questioning this underlying assumption. This article presents a former museum professional’s view on the educational potential of museum spaces, suggesting critical inquiry is a key skill of museum literacy. First, a historical view of museums shows how society has inscribed the institutions and their content with unwarranted authority. Secondly, an insider’s view of the exhibit creation process raises questions about the nature of the content we are often eager for students to consume. Third, an overview of research in museum studies offers an alternative understanding of the nature of learning in museum spaces. Finally, practical suggestions are given for valuing critical inquiry as part of museum literacy. For social studies educators interested in empowering their students to become reflective citizens, a key component of museum literacy will be critical engagement with not only the narratives on display, but also the institutions that house them.

As content acquisition is often conceived of as the primary goal of a museum visit, advice for social studies teachers on making the most of field trips primarily focuses on ways to increase the information absorbed by students. Yet, research in museum studies provides ample evidence for questioning this underlying assumption. This article presents a former museum professional’s view on the educational potential of museum spaces, suggesting critical inquiry is a key skill of museum literacy. First, a historical view of museums shows how society has inscribed the institutions and their content with unwarranted authority. Secondly, an insider’s view of the exhibit creation process raises questions about the nature of the content we are often eager for students to consume. Third, an overview of research in museum studies offers an alternative understanding of the nature of learning in museum spaces. Finally, practical suggestions are given for valuing critical inquiry as part of museum literacy. For social studies educators interested in empowering their students to become reflective citizens, a key component of museum literacy will be critical engagement with not only the narratives on display, but also the institutions that house them.

Museums have been discovering the Internet over the past few years like many other information provision sectors. Rather uniquely, they span both educational and commercial sectors, with a concentration of the original objects even in this virtual world. In 1994 the author developed the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), an online international distributed museum directory. This is part of the WWW Virtual Library and is also supported by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The directory is probably still the foremost such resource in this area, but commercial pressures are building, and the resource must develop to ensure its long‐term future. This paper explores the important developments so far, the current situation especially with regard to automatically collected virtual visitor statistics, and possible future directions for the VLmp directory and related resources.

Adolescents undoubtedly represent the future generation of adults who will be responsible for the preservation and management of heritage at local and national levels. It is essential to understand how to motivate and satisfy adolescents when visiting museums in their communities and beyond. A self-administered survey was conducted in 2016 with 360 adolescents who visited the Abgineh Museum of Tehran, Iran. Using descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation analysis and multiple linear regression analysis were used to interpret the findings, offering new insights into the subject. The study results suggest that travel and tourism companions influence adolescents’ motivations and satisfaction to visit museums.

This paper aims to analyse the socio-economic role of museums.

To explore the socio-economic role of museums, relevant literature on the role of museums was reviewed. Books and articles were consulted to shed light on museums as a cultural tourism product offering within the broader context of tourism as a catalyst of societal development.

The literature review revealed that museums are symbols of unity and identity and can serve as a catalyst of economic development of local communities. The article dispels the perception that museums are places where old stuff is stored and that they are at the periphery of societal development.

The paper is based on literature review and not an empirical study.

This paper proposes that museums should play a more active role in the socio-economic development of society.

This paper suggests that museums should educate the public about their role and place in society. Most importantly, they should create awareness about the socio-economic opportunities which they create. Thus, museums should position themselves as part of the societal effort to deal with societal challenges and not relegate themselves to the fringes of society. To this end, museums should establish partnerships with other agents of societal development. These organisations include chambers of commerce, educational institutions, government agencies and tourism organisations.

The paper dispels the perception that museums are places where old stuff is stored and that they are at the periphery of societal development.

The Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (MANN, National Archaeological Museum of Naples) is one of the most important archaeological museums in the world. In 2017, MANN launched several projects, such as Father and Son, the first video game made by an archaeological museum, and Ancient Present (Antico Presente), a series of five short films produced by the museum in five different languages and based on different artworks selected from the museum's permanent collections. The idea behind these projects was to ‘bring the museum outside the museum’, with the assumption that some tools may improve the museum's ability to speak and interact with its audiences, both in the spatial sense (outside its physical perimeter) and the temporal dimension (not only during the visit experience, but also before and after it). We have studied these two MANN projects, as this museum has explicitly targeted audience development as one of its main objectives (MANN, 2016, p. 72) and these projects are important examples of how to use new ‘languages’ (the digital and the cinematographic) to start a dialogue with new audiences and to address museum accessibility in a new way.