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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.

This paper compares the web accessibility of Indian museum websites assessing the level of compliance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1). The study aims to assess the accessibility of Indian museum websites in terms of their severity.

The accessibility evaluation of 11 Indian museum websites was conducted using Siteimprove Accessibility Checker (SAC), an automated website testing tool.

The study results indicate that the mean conformance score for the Indian museum websites for level A was 19.27, while for level AA and AAA, it came out to be 2.63 and 4.09, respectively, with the highest severity scores for error (16.3) followed by review (5.81) criteria and warning (3.81). The major findings indicate that the websites of Indian museums poorly conform to web accessibility guidelines.

The study's findings will assist the museum's website creators, managers and administrators in determining the level of conformity as per standard accessibility guidelines helping them make strategic decisions to improve the accessibility.

Most of the studies available in the field of website accessibility range from the web accessibility of educational institutions, tourism websites, municipal websites and ministerial websites, but there are very few studies investigating the accessibility of museum websites. A quantitative evaluation of different aspects of accessibility was conducted in the study, which can pave the way for the better design of web sites by addressing deficiencies.

“Darwin Country” is a website project giving access to images and information about the archives, paintings, decorative arts, archaeology and scientific collections of Shrewsbury Museums Service and its partners. By April 2002 the website had about 9000 pages and 6000 images. It is grant‐aided by the Resource IT Challenge Fund and the West Midlands Regional Museum Council. This database‐driven website utilises open‐source software to provide multi‐disciplinary content in a “knowledge‐net” environment created and maintained through a Content Management System. However, the author argues that “Content Management” is actually a process that involves more than a piece of software and should start with a vision and formulation of a strategy.

In recent years, OpenGLAM and the broader open license movement have been gaining momentum in the cultural heritage sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine OpenGLAM from the perspective of end users, identifying barriers for commercial and non-commercial reuse of openly licensed art images.

Following a review of the literature, the authors scope out how end users can discover institutions participating in OpenGLAM, and use case studies to examine the process they must follow to find, obtain and reuse openly licensed images from three art museums.

Academic literature has so far focussed on examining the risks and benefits of participation from an institutional perspective, with little done to assess OpenGLAM from the end users’ standpoint. The authors reveal that end users have to overcome a series of barriers to find, obtain and reuse open images. The three main barriers relate to image quality, image tracking and the difficulty of distinguishing open images from those that are bound by copyright.

This study focusses solely on the examination of art museums and galleries. Libraries, archives and also other types of OpenGLAM museums (e.g. archaeological) stretch beyond the scope of this paper.

The authors identify practical barriers of commercial and non-commercial reuse of open images, outlining areas of improvement for participant institutions.

The authors contribute to the understudied field of research examining OpenGLAM from the end users’ perspective, outlining recommendations for end users, as well as for museums and galleries.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the common issues affecting the cultural institutions’ websites in terms of organic search visibility and to detect if there are some category specifics for the national libraries, archives and museums.

In the first phase, an online survey was conducted involving the cultural institutions of national importance, aiming to map the current state of their websites in organizational and functional terms, to collect the information about the used domains, their social media activity and the use of analytical tools to monitor the visitor behavior and online traffic. In the second phase, the cultural institutions’ websites were analyzed using the “White Hat SEO” technics of optimization on Google.

From the category perspective, the historical archives have the best Technical search engine optimization (SEO) position due to the low coding errors and fair site speed, the libraries are leading in content generation and the museums have a very good total SEO index due to their strong social media activities. Common issues are detected in the description of web images, non-existence of sitemaps and low website mobile friendliness.

The data were collected from the personnel of the national cultural institutions based on their pre-assumed knowledge and understanding of website management.

The research methodology can be used to analyze the organic visibility of any national culture on search engines.

A research gap in addressing the cultural institutions’ websites from the search engine perspective was identified and addressed within the paper.

The study aims to paint a representative picture of the current state of search interfaces of Swedish online museum collections, focussing on search functionalities with particular reference to subject searching, as well as the use of controlled vocabularies, with the purpose of identifying which improvements of the search interfaces are needed to ensure high-quality information retrieval for the end user.

In the first step, a set of 21 search interface criteria was identified, based on related research and current standards in the domain of cultural heritage knowledge organization. Secondly, a complete set of Swedish museums that provide online access to their collections was identified, comprising nine cross-search services and 91 individual museums' websites. These 100 websites were each evaluated against the 21 criteria, between 1 July and 31 August 2020.

Although many standards and guidelines are in place to ensure quality-controlled subject indexing, which in turn support information retrieval of relevant resources (as individual or full search results), the study shows that they are not broadly implemented, resulting in information retrieval failures for the end user. The study also demonstrates a strong need for the implementation of controlled vocabularies in these museums.

This study is a rare piece of research which examines subject searching in online museums; the 21 search criteria and their use in the analysis of the complete set of online collections of a country represents a considerable and unique contribution to the fields of knowledge organization and information retrieval of cultural heritage. Its particular value lies in showing how the needs of end users, many of which are documented and reflected in international standards and guidelines, should be taken into account in designing search tools for these museums; especially so in subject searching, which is the most complex and yet the most common type of search. Much effort has been invested into digitizing cultural heritage collections, but access to them is hindered by poor search functionality. This study identifies which are the most important aspects to improve.

Purpose: In March 2020, due to the global emergency ensuing from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Italian government closed all national museums, institutes and places of culture heritage and landscape. The shutdown highlighted the need to develop and implement digital solutions, especially through ICTs, to enhance the cultural heritage worldwide by allowing people to go on admiring it, albeit remotely. Numerous initiatives were promoted, such as virtual experiential tours, online collections and ad hoc social and digital programs, all of which contributed to the rich dialogue between people and culture. Although digital initiatives for using and enjoying the cultural heritage have been successfully developed and implemented, in Italy the process of digitalisation of cultural heritage and the services provided are still far from being completed. This chapter investigates the development and implementation of digital technologies in the museums located in the Campania Region in Southern Italy throughout the COVID-19 outbreak to identify and analyse the experiential strategies and initiatives developed through information communication technologies (ICTs) to face the emergency.

Design/Methodology/Approach: By adopting a qualitative methodology, using primary and secondary data sources through a manual content analysis, experiential strategies and initiatives employed by the Campania regional museums when using digital solutions have been identified and categorised.

Findings: Despite the effectiveness of digital initiatives, and the experiences investigated appear both significant and interesting, there is still a need to develop and implement new experiential strategies in this field.

Research Limitations: This study presents several limitations, mostly related to its qualitative explorative nature, but also because its results cannot be generalised.

Practical Implications: These first results outline the need to further develop innovative strategies and initiatives within the museums. The process of digitalisation of cultural heritage and the services provided are still far from completion, potentially providing wide margins of further evolution by means of further investments in technology innovation, to rethink and redesign the traditional management models for enhancing the cultural heritage through digital technology.

Originality: This study provides a portrait of museum experiences supported by digital technologies in a country which plays a crucial role in the field of international cultural heritage. The analysis can also usefully contribute to the existing literature due to the qualitative technique employed for carrying out the multiple case study.

This study aims to analyse the level of digitalization in the cultural industry. More in detail, it aims to examine the determinants and effects of the digitalization level of museum organizations and the role played by the COVID-19 pandemic in the adoption of digital technologies.

In order to answer the research questions, this study uses the multiple case study methodology. In particular, three different museum organizations operating in the Apulian context were examined.

The findings show that the adoption of digital technologies derives from the desire to attract more visitors, reduce costs, improve the visitor experience and adapt to competitors. On the contrary, they show that the lack of funding represents a drag on the adoption of digital tools. In relation to the effects, the findings show financial advantages connected to an increase in revenues and a reduction in costs and non-financial benefits connected to an improvement of the intangibles. Finally, the results show that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies.

This work enriches the current literature through the analysis of the drivers and effects of digitalization in the museum industry and through the focus on COVID-19. Furthermore, to the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that examines the level of digitalization of museum organizations in the Apulian context.

Large cultural heritage datasets from museum collections tend to be biased and demonstrate omissions that result from a series of decisions at various stages of the collection construction. The purpose of this study is to apply a set of ethical criteria to compare the level of bias of six online databases produced by two major art museums, identifying the most biased and the least biased databases.

At the first stage, the relevant data have been automatically extracted from all six databases and mapped to a unified ontological scheme based on Wikidata. Then, the authors applied ethical criteria to the results of the geographical distribution of records provided by two major art museums as online databases accessed via museums' websites, API datasets and datasets submitted to Wikidata.

The authors show that the museums use different artworks in each of its online databases and each data-base has different types of bias reflected by the study variables, such as artworks' country of origin or the creator's nationality. For most variables, the database behind the online search system on the museum's website is more balanced and ethical than the API dataset and Wikidata databases of the two museums.

By applying ethical criteria to the analysis of cultural bias in various museum databases aimed at different audiences including end users, researchers and commercial institutions, this paper shows the importance of explicating bias and maintaining integrity in cultural heritage representation through different channels that potentially have high impact on how culture is perceived, disseminated, contextualized and transformed.