Friday, November 16, 2007

Evaluating online audiences

This question from Martin Bazley and Nicky Boyd, London via the Visitor Studies Group email alert: We are doing some research into online audiences for the London Museums Hub. Have you done any evaluation of your online audiences, or do you know of any other data or research? They also detail a range of other questions around audience and methodology.

Martin and Nicky, this is a really growing field of evaluation and we have been active in this area over the past year or so. As part of her internship here, Mel Broe did literature review of online audiences and evaluation which she posted here on my blog. I also posted about a study I did with teachers and students and the web which has a series of extra comments and links. I also presented a paper with some very initial work on digital audiences and museums to a bunch of interesting folks in Tubingen, Germany, just last week. I posted that paper on my wiki (go to the second one). I am developing this paper more as we do further research with online audiences aged 18-30 (which is being presented to us today) and teenagers (via an e-kids' college we are running here in two weeks time). I promise to blog about these projects further.

I also suggest you go to the Museums and Web search papers site and have a look there.

One (of the many) outstanding evaluators in Australia, Carolyn Meehan from Museum Victoria in Melbourne, has done very interesting online work and you could email her.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear Lynda,

Does visitors book and feedback form that we found at the end of exhibition falls under summative evaluation?