Interactive communication

Among the questions included in the questionnaire, there were some addressing the interactive multimedia communication, related to the availability of a website, the frequency of its updating and the use of web media.

As the pie chart shows, only 77% of the museums investigated declared to have a website, while 14% declared they would like to have a website by still don’t have one. Unfortunately, and this is clearly the most alarming data, 3% of the survey declared they had a website in the past, but they don’t have it anymore, suggesting a communication strategy that considers the website not strictly necessary.

It was decided to identify more specifically which museums responded negatively to the question on the use of a website, also in consideration of the managing structure of the museum. The investigation revealed that all university museums in the survey had a website, while no ecclesiastical museum had one. Furthermore 27% of the municipal museums, 50% of private museums and 20% of provincial museums claimed not to have a website.

A more in-depth analysis of the responses on the multimedia communication showed that only 63% of the investigated museums used to update regularly the website, while many of them didn’t update it frequently and 3% of the surveyed museums never updated it. Such an attitude revealed two realities: on one hand, the necessity to respond to the pressing information demand dominating the age of the instant communication; on the other hand, the difficulty to really understand how necessary is the full exploitation of the potential of the internet. The last observation
leads us to hypothesize that the use of the tool is not adequate.