How Museums Share Their Collections Online: A Ten-Year Study of Communication Approaches

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This research has been close to my heart for over a decade, evolving alongside the digital transformation I've witnessed throughout my career. I started this work in 2007 when I was at the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication at the University of the Aegean in Greece (2003-2013), and completed the second phase in 2017 after moving to the University of Glasgow in 2013. When we began, museums were just beginning to grapple with putting substantial parts of their collections online. I was fascinated by the gap between institutions that simply digitised their card catalogues versus those reimagining how people might engage with collections in fundamentally new ways. Working with my co-author Ion Gil Fuentetaja has been invaluable—this collaboration began when he was a Marie Curie CHIRON Research Fellow at the University of the Aegean, coming from the Basque country in Spain to work with me in Mytilene. Ion not only impressed me with how quickly he learned Greek and mastered traditional Greek dances, but also worked incredibly hard on this research! Together we were able to combine my longstanding interest in museum visitor experience with rigorous quantitative analysis across multiple countries. The ten-year comparison revealed something I'd intuited but hadn't seen proven so clearly: museums are genuinely evolving toward more democratic models of knowledge sharing, not just in rhetoric but in actual practice. What continues to intrigue me is the tension between technological possibility and institutional culture. The same CMS (collections management system) can be implemented in radically different ways depending on a museum's philosophy of communication. This connects directly to my current work on emotional engagement and participatory design—technical features matter less than the values and assumptions driving their implementation. The participatory museum findings particularly resonate with my research on the EMOTIVE project and community co-creation. While we found widespread social media adoption, I remain curious about whether museums are truly opening up their processes or simply broadcasting through new channels. This question became even more central through my POEM (Participatory Memory Practices) MSCA project (2018-2023), where I supervised Cassandra (Cassy) Kist's PhD on the use of social media in museums for socially inclusive work. After she completed her doctorate at Glasgow, we collaborated on the GKEF project together, which included a fascinating National Museums Scotland case study examining the use of images in their online catalogues—bringing us full circle to the questions raised in this paper. These threads—participatory practices, audience engagement, and online collections—continue to interweave throughout my work, including my current British Academy Fellowship research. Looking back, this paper represents a crucial foundation for understanding digital cultural heritage not just as a technical challenge but as a fundamental rethinking of how museums relate to their audiences in an networked age.

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