Abstract
ABSTRACTVisits to museums have been studied as hedonic and utilitarian forms of cultural consumption, though limited attention has been given to the access of museum collections online. We perform a unique historic analysis of the visibility of collections in a museum of ethnographic collections and compare 100 years of onsite visits to 5 years online visits. We find two main results: first, access to collections increased substantially online. From a selection of objects available both onsite and online, access grew from an average of 156,000 onsite visits per year to over 1.5 million views online per year. Onsite, the museum received 15.5 million visits in a span of a century while online, collections were viewed 7.9 million times in only the last 5 years. Second, we find a difference in consumer preference for type of object, favouring 3D onsite and 2D online (photographs of objects, particularly when showing them being used). Results support understanding of online heritage consumption and emerging dynamics, particularly outside of an institutional environment, such as Wikipedia.
Highlights
Visiting museums has become an important leisure activity and touristic attraction (Frey, 2006), predominantly to institutions with a higher ease of physical accessibility (Brook, 2016) and for visitors with higher levels of education, income (Falk and Katz-Gerro, 2015), and an intellectual motivation (Brida, et al, 2015)
We found the ethnographic museum in Amsterdam (NMVM),9 with a collection of 600,000 objects, holds a digital record of exhibitions per object for the past 100 years in its digital database The Museum System (TMS)
We find evidence that the quantity of goods consumed has greatly increased in an online environment, leading to observable changes in consumer preference, favouring high quality and diversity of content
Summary
Visiting museums has become an important leisure activity and touristic attraction (Frey, 2006), predominantly to institutions with a higher ease of physical accessibility (Brook, 2016) and for visitors with higher levels of education, income (Falk and Katz-Gerro, 2015), and an intellectual motivation (Brida, et al, 2015). We find new preference patterns in the online environment: readers favour English pages that include rich and diverse content (quality indicator), while editors favour alternative languages with little content, suggesting a trend to enrich the information market This is relevant for ethnographic museums giving digital access to their holdings, facilitating cross-cultural encounters for further knowledge making (Witcomb, 2007). Results contribute to the empirical research on consumer behaviour and heritage consumption preference, of hedonic products (content) available free of charge in the online market. This paper is the first, to the best of our knowledge, to compare change in consumption preference of heritage content from an onsite to an online environment in an empirical framework using historic visitor data.
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