Spanish Museums Research Articles

Unveiling the Instagram effect: Decoding factors influencing visiting intentions of superstar Spanish museums

This study employs the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) paradigms to delve into the intricate variables that shape Instagram users' intentions to visit renowned Spanish museums, known as the Golden Triangle of Art. Leveraging a comprehensive analysis using partial least squares, this research scrutinizes the visiting intentions of Instagram users and synthesizes insights from a diverse sample of 956 respondents. The findings of this study yield remarkable contributions: (1) presenting an exceptional framework for advancing research in the realm of visiting intentions within the S-O-R and TAM paradigms; (2) bridging a critical research gap by exploring the influence of social networks on visiting intentions; and (3) illuminating the vital role of cognitive and affective reactions in translating information attributes into tangible behavioural responses. This research offers insights for academia, practitioners, and museum stakeholders alike, shaping the understanding of digital platforms’ impact on cultural tourism.

Enhancing Accessibility and Navigation of Heritage Collections Through Interactive Spatiotemporal Maps

Visualizing data allows us to interactively explore and analyze datasets, which can be dynamic, noisy, and heterogeneous. In the field of cultural heritage, more and more museums and cultural institutions are exploiting modern visualization systems to disseminate their content in an attractive, usable, and interactive way, which involves displaying data on spatiotemporal maps. The SeMap project has built an online resource that displays more than 200,000 cultural objects from the CER.ES repository, which was created by a network of more than 100 Spanish museums. In this repository, SeMap analyzes the textual data to extract meaning, showing the results on interactive spatiotemporal maps, which bring new experiences and perspectives around such objects. This article explains the strategies to visualize such information, as well as an evaluation of the finalized tool by second-year university students on a Data Science graduate programme, as part of the subject of Data Visualization. Results show that most of the students find the tool usable although they do not fully understand the cultural-related content.

A satisfactory visitor experience: dimensions and contextual components of Spanish museums

A satisfactory visitor experience: dimensions and contextual components of Spanish museums

Reviewing the “Bilbao effect” inside and beyond the Guggenheim: Its coming of age in sprawling cultural landscapes

AbstractInvented by journalists, the “Bilbao effect” label has no clear meaning, but it undoubtedly refers to outwardly radiating waves of influence beyond the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Its architecture and urban impact, with trickle down economic returns, has drawn international attention and many emulators. Its museological novelties have inspired great changes in Spanish museums and in Basque cultural policies. However, the external effect of this institution beyond its headquarters should be tracked most particularly along the Abandoibarra district, which is now a thriving curatorial landscape, typifying an outdoors version of Svetlana Alpers's “museum effect.” Are we experiencing a paradigm shift? Outliving all sort of setbacks, the epitome of postmodern museums remains faithful to itself and new kinds of cultural clusters are being promoted beyond it. The current climate crisis has called into question previous assumptions of success based on massive international tourism, which is perhaps unsustainable. But the cultural district of Bilbao is booming and expanding down the Nervión river.

Serious Games to Enhance Education. Play, Technology and Archaeology in a Spanish museum

Serious games are a powerful resource in the teaching-learning process in formal and informal learning settings since this kind of activity motivates participants to take part actively in their own learning process. Within informal learning environments, they serve to improve their pedagogical role, which is sometimes difficult to be perceived by users. Nevertheless, serious games play another equally important role in museums, Art galleries or Science centres: engaging part of the surrounding society with this kind of institutions. This paper describes a “serious game” using new technology that includes Information and Communication Technologies and 3D digitized models to be played in informal learning settings. It aims to enhance their didactic role and look for social engagement. An experimental experience was carried out in the National Museum of Roman Art (Mérida, Spain) to attract and retain a specific group of people, teenagers, reluctant to visit archaeological museums most of the time since they considered them boring places. Finally, this experience served to assess the applicability and versatility as an educational resource of the game scheme proposed.

Instagram as a participatory tool: A comparative analysis of six Spanish museums

Digital media is usually understood as a tool that helps the social and participatory ideal of museums and cultural institutions to materialize. This ideal has its roots in the reflections that, since the 1980s, new museology and critical museology movements have developed around the renewal of cultural organizations: a transformation that places the visitor at the center of the institution, revises their stories about its collections and invites institutions to be more participative with the public. Seeking to identify the characteristics that these theories adopt in practice, this article investigates the forms of participation implemented on Instagram by six Spanish cultural institutions: Museo Nacional del Prado Museum, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona (MACBA) and Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona (CCCB). By way of a content analysis of their publications over the span of 6 months, patterns and trends have been identified within the communication strategies of these organizations. The results indicate a clear predominance of minimalist participatory forms (those oriented towards access to practical information and the discovery of collections) over maximalist modalities related to collaboration or co-creation. In general terms, there is also a considerable presence of audiovisual formats in the publications analyzed, showing the great capacity of these institutions to adapt to the latest changes in Instagram.

Increasing Access to Cultural Heritage Objects from Multiple Museums through Semantically-Aware Maps

Geographical information is gaining new momentum as an analysis and visualization tool for collections of cultural objects. It provides all kinds of users with new opportunities to contextualize and understand these objects in ways that resemble our ordinary spatially-located experience and to do so better than textual narratives. The SeMap project has built an online resource that shows more than 200,000 cultural objects through spatiotemporal maps, thus enabling new experiences and perspectives around these objects. Data come from the CER.ES repository and were created by a network of more than 100 Spanish museums. This article explains the refinement of the data provided by the repository, mostly by adding a semantic structure thanks to the CIDOC-CRM ontology, and by simplifying the exceedingly complex terminologies employed in the original records. Particular attention is paid to the methods for geolocating the information, as well as adding temporal filters (among others) to user queries. The functionalities, interface, and technical requirements are also explored at length.

The Need to Create a Network of Exile Museums

This article examines the Spanish museum scene in terms of the problem of establishing a network of exile museums that evoke democratic memory. The Spanish case is shaped by the Civil War (1936-1939), which has resulted in a diaspora of numerous artists whose legacy is preserved today in different museums across the country; but to date there has been no initiative to create an inter-territorial connection at a national level that would favour the creation of this much-needed network. In this article we propose to demonstrate the necessity of realising such a project, following the example of what has been carried out in other areas that were the scene of conflicts.

Spanish house museums on the web and with the web: a galaxy of technologies

ABSTRACT This study examines the relationship between house museums and ICTs by looking at well-known examples which demonstrate that the use of ICTs in this context is not generalised. The benefits derived from the implementation of ICTs prove that this implementation is necessary to allow house museums to take a step forward and integrate data analysis into their communication plans with the objective of placing museum visitors at the centre of museum services. House museums will thereby be able to optimise their decision-making and adopt strategies that will improve the quality of visitors’ museum experiences. Obtaining and analysing data about museum visitors and their experiences is made easier with Data technology, which can forecast patterns that illustrate types of visitor behaviour, helping museums to better understand and more fully profile visitors. In an increasingly digitalised market, house museums must generate interaction and interest to improve visitors’ museum experiences.

Working to Create Value: Spanish Museums and the Challenge of Connecting with Generation Z

The Covid-19 pandemic has temporarily emptied museums and drawn attention to an aspect of these cultural institutions that is often seen as secondary and subordinate to their physical presence: the digital dimension. Having been forced to close their doors, museums have sought to boost their online activity through a range of different initiatives. The most notable actions undertaken in terms of frequency are related to social networks. This situation obliges us to ask the question: have museums succeeded in achieving a meaningful online presence in their communities via social media? In terms of marketing and digital communication, content is understood as meaningful when it provides value to the audience. This value arises from the alignment of the objectives of the institution with those of the target audience; this makes it essential to understand the profile of users who comprise the communities of different digital channels. Drawing on a comparative analysis of the profiles of museum visitors and those of social media users, this paper addresses the challenges of connecting on social media with the generation known as Generation Z (a population currently between 14 and 24 years of age). To do so, it attempts to define this generation and determine how it uses social media, taking advantage of the work already carried out by Spanish museums on their social media profiles during lockdown to establish how museum institutions can make themselves more relevant to this demographic segment in Spain and beyond.

The Future of Museums. An Analysis from the Visitors’ Perspective in the Spanish Context

The social role of museums has long been part of the academic debate: different disciplines and fields of knowledge have explored the social shift of museums and have re-envisioned their future. However, little attention has been paid to the views of visitors on the future of museums. This article addresses this issue by adopting an audience development approach. It analyses a questionnaire administered to 685 visitors to 16 Spanish museums between October and December 2019. The findings revealed that the audience believed that museums should offer a vision that respects cultural diversity, and provide enriching and memorable experiences, while at the same time defending the classic values of cultural heritage, among others. Women and visitors that gave more importance to the practice of visiting museums than to other cultural practices were found to be the most demanding visitor segments.

Музей Кадиса и его коммуникационная стратегия

During lockdown 2020, museums reacted by attempting to digitally offer everything that had previously been done in the museum space. The testing of tools and resources, as well as new forms of communication and participatory techniques, leads us to a hybrid museum where virtuality is combined with physical presence. The new reality has intensified the current discussions about the museum as a socio-cultural institution, a new definition of the concept of a museum, about the relationship between entertainment and educational forms of interpretation of heritage. Along with an overview of key research trends and methodological approaches in the field of heritage, the article presents the results of the analysis of social networks of the Museum of Cadiz, based on a methodological approach to planning and evaluating integrated communications - the PESO model, which separates the channels of information dissemination into paid, earned, social and owned. The Cadiz Museum was not chosen as an object of research by chance, since even before the pandemic, its digital communications stood out strongly against the background of other Spanish museums of different levels. It is possible that they managed to achieve this due to the fact that they made their pages on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter not only the showcase of the museum, but also the very entrance to the museum. Social networks for the Museum of Cadiz are the only channel with which he can independently work. The official pages of the Museum of Cadiz, during the pandemic, were analyzed for the period from March 12 (the announcement of the closure of museums) to August 31, using the Russian automated service for analytics of brand communities in social networks, JagaJam. The data is compared with the same period in 2019 (except for Twitter, for which there is no data).

Facebook as a Promotional Tool for Spanish Museums 2016–2020 and COVID Influence

As Waller and Waller stated, Social Media produces an intense effect on culture-based institutions' practice. Social networks promote the concept of "digital social museum", as one that takes advantage of digital technologies' opportunities to deepen the achievement of a genuinely close museum and expand the exhibition's target audience. However, do museums use Facebook to educate and transmit culture to users, or as a mere promotional tool? Are there differences between its use in museums? Were their Facebook Promotion Strategies directly affected by the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic?

Valuing Visual Disability as a Richness in Spanish Museums

Valuing Visual Disability as a Richness in Spanish Museums

Spanish Archaeological Museums during COVID-19 (2020): An Edu-Communicative Analysis of Their Activity on Twitter through the Sustainable Development Goals

On 18 March 2020, Spanish museums saw their in-person activities come to a halt. This paradigm shift has raised questions concerning how these institutions reinvented themselves and modified their edu-communicative strategies to promote heritage through active citizen participation. The present study centers on analyzing how the main Spanish archaeological museums and sites (N = 254) have used Twitter as an edu-communicative tool and analyzes the content of their hashtags through a mixed methodology. The objective is to identify the educational strategies for both transmitting information as well as interacting with users. We did it by observing and analyzing if Spanish archaeological institutions are promoting a type of quality, accessible, and egalitarian education and promoting the creation of cyber communities that ensure the sustainability of heritage through citizen participation. This paper proposes an innovative assessment of communication on Twitter based on the purpose of messages from the viewpoint of heritage education, their r-elational factor, and predominant type of learning. The main findings reveal a significant increase in Twitter activity, both in quantitative and qualitative terms: educational content is gaining primacy over the simple sharing of basic information and promotional content. The networks forge new ways to teach–learn and interact with media and represent a strong channel to promote the sustainability of heritage, its preservation, and appreciation.

Museums and Marketing: a Controversy over New Strategies

Objective: This paper aims to review the function of marketing in the field of museum management and offers practical and creative solutions for museums to successfully balance the conflict between the museums’ sustainable operation and their original functions, such as education and preservation. Methodology: The research is mainly based on long-term observations of museum management and marketing in both China and Spain. A review and analysis of previous studies has been conducted to build the context. Results: The implementation of appropriate marketing methods by way of cross-industry cooperation and new technologies can not only assist museums in financial issues but could also result in a win-win outcome which could promote the original mission of museums. Limitations: This article is mainly based on the Chinese and Spanish contexts, however, some relevant features of other countries have also been described. Practical implications: The suggested strategies mentioned in this paper contribute to the development of practical marketing methods for Spanish museums, oriented towards meeting the need for sustainable operation, and ways to communicate to the public at large, in accordance with the museum’s key objectives.

Impact of High-Speed Rail on Cultural Tourism Development: The Experience of the Spanish Museums and Monuments

Although transport infrastructure is one of the prominent factors that make Spain a major tourist destination, the international literature has revealed that the opening of new High-Speed Rail (HSR) lines is not sufficient by itself in order to increase tourist outputs in the new connected destinations. Nevertheless, the roles played by different characteristics of both travelers and destinations are of interest but they still remain not sufficiently explored. This paper focuses on the role played by HSR in fostering cultural tourism by applying a fixed-effect econometric model to a panel database (1988–2017). The database includes the number of tourists to some of the major Spanish cultural centers. The results show different impacts based on the regions, the characteristics of the museums, and the expected tourists. For destinations with previous cultural attraction, a positive effect is more evident. Moreover, the centrality of the HSR station as an enabling factor as well as the growth of the tourist market to the surrounding municipalities has been detected. Another interesting result is related to the cooperation effect between HSR and air transport, which encourages the arrivals of foreign tourists. These findings should help planners to develop policies that optimize tourist revenues by exploiting the potential of HSR development in the future.

Assessing the role of collaboration in the process of museum innovation

ABSTRACT The relationship between collaboration and innovation in cultural organisations is an emerging topic that has drawn particular attention from scholars and practitioners. The main aim of this study is to assess the role of collaboration in the process of innovation in museum organisations. To achieve this aim, first, we develop a four-domain analytical framework by matching innovation types to cultural production processes to reflect the peculiarities of museum innovation. By applying this framework to the multiple case studies from four Spanish museums, we identify three main motivations (supplementing manpower, compensating for the scarcity of knowledge, improving demand-driven innovation) and four forms of collaboration (teamwork, outsourcing, consortium and conversation) and summarise the different modes of collaboration involved in various domains of production and innovation. An assessment is conducted subsequently to evaluate the effectiveness of existing collaborations in achieving technological and cultural innovation in museums. Finally, a list of implications for museums’ innovation management is presented.

Los principales retos de las instituciones culturales con la comunicación online en la revolución 2.0

Tener una mayor presencia y una buena comunicación en el mundo digital se ha convertido en un punto trascendental para las instituciones culturales. A pesar de los intentos para mejorar esta relación, muchos museos españoles continúan sin comprender cuestiones como: el valor que esta clase de comunicación puede ofrecer a la entidad, el tipo de relación se ha de establecer con los usuarios digitales y los beneficios a largo plazo que puede generar, entre otros aspectos. En el presente artículo, se pretende dar visibilidad a los principales retos que las organizaciones culturales deben afrontar respecto a la gestión de sus redes sociales, mostrando propuestas que se han llevado a cabo desde algunas instituciones que no han dudo en participar en la revolución 2.0.

Degradation processes of historic metal threads used in some Spanish and Portuguese ornamentation pieces

Abstract The degradation processes that occurred on metal threads applied in the embroidery used for clothing and in the ornamentation of sculptures, the Sevillian Holy Week processions, and Portuguese and Spanish palace and museum are thoroughly analyzed. Some threads from the 14th and 18–19th centuries were considered. In the metal threads, sulphur- and chlorine-based compounds were detected either individually or together, depending on the degradation process. Basic silver carbonate, sodium bicarbonate and copper-based compounds were also observed. The different degradation processes were attributed to different factors, such as environmental contamination, degradation of the fibrous cores, and inadequate cleaning and/or mechanical treatments.