Museums ans Web 2.0

Lately the world has been witnessing the Web 2.0 climbing the scale of popularity. It has penetrated into many areas of human activity including business, politics and culture. The latter fact is particularly revealed through museums mastering the new technologies and social media. Their aim is clearly to reach broader audiences and to win new visitors. However, correlating the user-centered paradigm of Web 2.0 with the authoritative position of museums is a difficult task. Hence, the way of adoption Web 2.0 by museums is full of challenges. In general, the thesis appeals to two broad questions: “how do museums adopt Web 2.0?” and “how to make those attempts more successful (e.g. how to encourage participation in museums’ Web 2.0 campaigns)?” Thus, the aim of the first half of this paper (chapters 1-3) is to understand the significance of Web 2.0 for the museum sector, to figure out the barriers for its adoption and to examine how Art museums in North Holland approach Web 2.0 features. The study undertaken in this part provides an idea of how Dutch Art museums cultivate on-line relationships through social media and which new features they embed in their websites. The findings also shed some light on whether these attempts are successful. The core properties of Web 2.0 are interaction, collaboration and contribution. The first part of the thesis questions whether museums on-line activities correspond with these principles. Furthermore, even if the above mentioned requirements are met, the success of Web 2.0 campaign heavily depends on user contributions. Hence, encouraging user participation and contributions is another big challenge for museums. The second part of the thesis (chapters 4-5), thus, focuses on that problem. It analyzes the environment, the audience and the successful practices for stimulating user participation in order to formulate a business model of a successful Web 2.0 museum campaign. Among the issues discussed in this part are compositions and matching of museum and social media audiences, user motivations to contribute online and the potential of public participatory projects for online museum practices. Finally, to provide a better illustration of the findings and to give an example of the proposed business model at work a case study of Hermitage Amsterdam museum is performed in the last chapter. The study is aimed at developing a scenario of an interactive and participatory web campaign, which would meet the user-oriented nature of Web 2.0 but at the same time would suit the museum’s specific operating principles. Overall, the thesis refers to multiple data sources and presents a quantitative research in order to study the level of Web 2.0 adoption by Art museums in North Holland, to figure out the recipes for successful museum Web 2.0 practices and to give an example of a museum campaign, which accords with both social media environment and a museum’s organizational specifics and is designed in a user participation encouraging way.