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This study examines the enabling factors and practices that foster knowledge management in museums and the impact of those factors and practices on museums' performance and public value.

The authors conducted an exploratory survey of senior leaders of 191 small and mid-sized museums in the United States. The survey tested a novel conceptual model that integrates the constructs of knowledge management enablers, knowledge management orientation and organizational performance. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses of survey data were conducted to identify both the presence and dimensions of these constructs as well as the nature of the relationships among them.

The results of this study identified strong and significant predictive relationships between the constructs of its novel conceptual model. However, findings also identified key gaps in how museums create, manage and share organizational knowledge. These gaps limit their organizational performance and their ability to create public value. The authors identify specific factors and practices that enable museums to improve their organizational performance and increase their public value.

As the first empirical study of knowledge management enablers and knowledge management orientation in museums, this research not only adapts the study of these constructs to the museum sector, but it develops a novel conceptual model that links these constructs to multiple dimensions of a museum's organizational performance and public value. This research sets the stage for new study of knowledge management in museums; it also provides valuable insights for museum leaders.

The purpose of this research aims at extending the knowledge on whether and how universities include sustainability dimensions in managing their collections. Precisely, the study focusses on the creation of a university museum (UM), as an embryonic stage of life during which management concerns both strategic and operational issues.

Sustainability is envisioned as a multifaceted concept, composed of the economic, cultural, environmental and social dimensions. Resorting to an acknowledged theoretical model for sustainable development in museum management, a qualitative interpretative study is carried out, gathering data from multiple sources. The empirical setting is the University of Pavia, which has recently created a new Museum of Natural History (Kosmos).

Results highlight how sustainability dimensions intertwin in UM creation. Moreover, the economic dimension emerges as a basement for the others. Value for the community, expressed in economic terms, must be ensured in UMs creation as well as throughout its entire life, in order to support cultural, environmental and social sustainability.

Focussing on the embryonic stage of UMs life allowed to consider how sustainability is embedded in relevant strategic and operational decisions. Nevertheless, scholars are encouraged to replicate the study in other stages of UMs' life, in a way to provide insights on its dynamics.

University collections managers can benefit from this research by acknowledging the role played by the economic dimension of sustainability. Notwithstanding their mission, universities should pay attention to extracting economic value from the management of their collections, as a means to ensure innovative and sustainable management on the cultural, environmental and social respects. Furthermore, this research suggests how a higher education system is able to create a new museum by relying on interdisciplinary competencies, which support sustainability since the embryonic stage.

This research contributes to the cultural heritage management literature by proposing an updated version of the sustainable development model for museums, which highlights the different relevance of the sustainability dimensions with particular regard to the UM creation and management.

In recent years museums have changed from being predominantly custodial institutions to becoming increasingly focussed on audience attraction. New emphasis is placed on museum‐audience interactions and relationships. This change in the purpose and priorities of museums has impacted upon the nature of museum management. The recognition of new roles for museum directors and the need to appeal to differentiated audiences has created new challenges for previously traditional, custodial directors. This paper presents a conceptual framework for managing museums, taking account of the museum service context and the delivery of the museum service product. It then examines two museums, one in Ireland and one in Australia, both of which have a similar cultural history. The paper considers the different management styles for museum directors and how these different styles illustrate the changes in professional perspective from the traditional (a focus on custodial preservation) to the more current (a focus on educating and entertaining the public).

The purpose of this paper is to explore the current role of competition as one of the neglected aspects of museum marketing management. It also aims to discover whether museum professionals consider museums to be market immune and to find out what they think about the role of competition in creating and managing their existing and new services.

The theoretical part of the paper is based on a review of the literature from the multidisciplinary field of arts and museum marketing management. The exploratory qualitative research included 17 museum professionals and was carried out in 17 museums in one EU emerging market country.

Museum professionals are not aware of the competition, or they tend to ignore its existence. They consider the preservation of objects (exhibits) to be equally or even more important than providing services. However, additional services become important. Although some museum professionals try to engage visitors in the active creation of museum experience, most are still conservative in such terms.

The primary research limitations are related to intentional, convenience sample and the perspective of one employee (marketing manager or museums’ director).

Research findings provide valuable insights for both marketing academics and professionals engaged in the museum marketing management field. The contribution of the paper is also contextual as it helps to bridge the gap existing in museum marketing management research in the context of the emerging markets.

El objetivo de este trabajo es explorar el papel actual de la competencia, como uno de los aspectos que ha recibido escasa atención en la gestión del marketing de museos. Además, busca descubrir si los profesionales de museos consideran los museos inmunes al mercado, y conocer cómo reflexionan sobre el papel de la competencia en la creación y la gestión de los servicios existentes y los nuevos.

La parte teórica del trabajo se basa en la revisión de la literatura del campo multidisciplinario de la gestión de las artes y del marketing de museos. La investigación cualitativa exploratoria ha incluido 17 profesionales de museos y se ha realizado en 17 museos, en un país emergente de la Unión Europea.

Los profesionales de museos no son conscientes de la competencia, o tienden a ignorar su existencia. Consideran la conservación de objetos (exposiciones) igual o incluso más importante que la prestación de servicios. Sin embargo, los servicios adicionales están ganando en importancia. Si bien algunos profesionales de museos tratan de involucrar a los visitantes en la creación activa de la experiencia del museo, la mayoría de ellos todavía son conservadores con respecto a esta idea.

Las limitaciones principales de la investigación serefieren a la muestra intencional de conveniencia y el punto de vista de solo un empleado (gerente de marketing o director de museo).

Los resultados de este estudio proporcionan información valiosa tanto para los académicos de marketing como para los profesionales que trabajan en el campo de la gestión de marketing de museos. Además, la contribución de este trabajo es contextual puesto que ayuda a llenar el vacio existente en la investigación de la gestión de marketing de museos en el contexto de los mercados emergentes.

This paper suggests mobile ethnography as a method for data collection, where Generation Y customers are integrated as active investigators. The paper aims to contribute to the debate on museums as experience‐centred places, to understanding how the experience is perceived by Generation Y, to identifying the customer journey, to providing an insight into service experience consumption and to deriving managerial implication for the museum industry of how to approach Generation Y.

Mobile ethnography is applied to the National Museum of Australia in Canberra with a sample of Generation Y visitors as the future visitor market.

The paper finds that there is a need to involve museum management in measuring museum experiences, especially with regard to the definition and improvement of the service‐delivery processes. Service experience must be appropriately managed by museum operators by collecting, evaluating, storing and reusing relevant data on customer experience. Mobile ethnography and tools such as MyServiceFellow offer an important potential source of sustainable competitive advantage by improving customer experience, particularly for Gen Y.

The most significant limitation is the exploratory nature of the single case study derived from a small sample within only one museum.

This is one of the few studies to have addressed mobile ethnography in a service context and examined the museum experience of Generation Y. The paper finds that there is a need to involve museum management in service design to improve the service‐delivery process, especially with regard to the different mindsets of the Millennials.

Managerialization – i.e. the institutional and organizational transformation of cultural institutions acknowledging the need for a managerial action to address their value propositions – is radically reshaping the way museums interact with relevant stakeholders and arrange their service offering. The paper aims at making sense out of the manifold implications of managerialization on museum activities.

Secondary data were collected from a sample of 4,073 Italian museums and art institutions. A logit regression model was designed to investigate the implications of museums’ managerialization on pricing strategies, service offering, organizational and marketing policies, inter-organizational relationships and digitalization.

Managerialization triggered an evolution in museums’ service offering and organizational practices. Institutions that underwent a managerial development were more likely to innovate their policies and strategies. However, managerialization may undermine the way museums focus on disadvantaged people, nurturing inequalities in the access to their service offering.

The managerialization of museums should be handled as a double-edged sword. Although it contributes in enriching the museums’ service offering and in differentiating their activities, it may generate drawbacks on the art institutions’ ability to address the demands of underprivileged groups. Tailored correctives are needed to avoid the side effects of managerialization.

This is one of the first attempts to investigate the implications of managerialization on museums’ practices and inter-organizational relationships. The research findings provide some insights into the challenges that are related to the managerialization of museums and art institutions.

The hostile environments in which museums operate force them to be innovative. Most of them have fewer resources and are publicly owned. Because these factors may hinder their innovative potential, this paper aims to propose an open innovation model adapted to this type of organization to improve visitors’ experience.

A qualitative method based on a thematic analysis is carried out. Data sources are: (i) focus group with stakeholders from the destination and (ii) in-depth interviews with museums experts.

This new framework is important because it brings something new to a field that previous research had barely considered. The study of the implementation of open innovation in publicly owned small and medium-sized museums brings to light the growing importance of the relational, organizational, technological and experiential dimensions, their interactions and their main constituent factors.

The study is limited to a specific type of institution, and results should not be extrapolated to other contexts. The construct of open innovation is highly complex, and that advises future research to include other players. Quantitative methods and longitudinal techniques will contribute to tackling new challenges in future research works.

Results are helpful for museum managers and policymakers. Stakeholders improve their comprehension of how an open innovation model works because the paper offers a few guidelines for its active designing. A solid networking based on trust and the emphasis on improving the visitor experience determine making-decision processes.

The paper provides a systemic innovation management model for museums, where there is almost no previous research. It is theoretically supported in the open innovation paradigm, as well as the absorptive capacity framework. The emerging and central role of the experiential dimension constitutes another notable contribution to literature.

This paper sets out to present a new model to avoid the content silo trap, satisfy the knowledge management requirement and support the long‐term perspective of developing academic, exhibition, and education applications among various domains for museums.

This paper presents a unified knowledge‐based content management (UKCM) model, which comprises the unified knowledge content processes, multi‐layer reusable knowledge content structures and an integrated knowledge‐based content management system to solve the content silo trap problem. The extended entity‐relationship (EER) conceptual model is applied to design a global view of the integrated knowledge system and completely represent multi‐layer reusable knowledge content structures for the spectrum of various knowledge assets for all domains and applications in a museum.

A practical case of a large‐scale digital archives project that includes various domains of a natural science museum has been successfully implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model.

This paper integrates content management and knowledge management. Digital archives programs in museums can apply the model presented in this study to satisfy the knowledge management requirement and support the long‐term perspective of developing academic, exhibition, and education applications among various domains.

This paper aims to present a conceptual model for public relations specific to museums.

Based on relevant literature, a contingency model is developed for the public relations practices of museums.

The model offers the market orientation level of the management and the interest level of the publics as the major factors that influence the effectiveness of the public relations programs in museums. The interest level of the publics is offered as a moderating variable.

The model suggests that the effectiveness of the public relations programs of museums depends on two major factors. Although the interest level of the publics may seem to be uncontrollable at first glance, its negative impact can be largely controllable by managers by changing their own market orientation level – by adapting the public relations strategy to the targeted public depending on the interest level of that public.

The model is specifically designed for museums. It can be accepted as the first public relations model specifically offered for museums. The model here recognises the relationship between marketing and public relations.

Studies that examine users’ perceptions of museum’s website quality are scarce. The purpouse of this paper is to propose a multi-group comparison between two superstar museums to outline the variables that define website quality regarding museum websites towards achieving e-loyalty, trust and perceived control.

The sample comprised 305 valid online questionnaires, collected from a panel survey using a quota-sampling technique. The proposed model was tested using partial least squares analysis multi-group comparison between Prado and Thyssen-Bornemisza museum websites.

Website quality plays a determinant role in users’ behavioural outcomes. As evidenced in the results for the first time in a museum setting, website quality has the potential of influencing e-loyalty, trust and perceived control. Besides, trust has a positive influence on e-loyalty and perceived control, on trust. The multi-group comparison revealed no significant differences between the two museum superstars, which offer highly useful insights for the correct design of these websites.

This research addresses a multi-group comparison using partial least squares, a quite recent technique that advances knowledge regarding this method. It contributes to knowledge museum website management and online literature by means of proposing website quality as a dimension that includes content, ease of understanding, emotion, informational fit-to-task, promotion and visual appeal and by revealing significant effects of the relationships of the proposed model. Museum managers are provided with valuable inputs to design websites in an appropriate and suitable way for their users so they will be more willing to repeat their navigation experience.