Ownership,organization structure and public service provision: the case of museums

This article provides an empirical investigation of the effects of the ownership and organizational structure on the performance of cultural institutions. More specifically, we consider how museums are effective in their function of disseminating culture to audiences and contributing to the local development. By exploiting a unique data set based on the 2011 census of Italian museums, we develop performance indices of accessibility, visitors’ experience, web visibility and promotion of the local cultural context. Using count data models, we regress such measures on the type of organization. We distinguish between governmental museums, public museums whose administration is either outsourced or has financial autonomy and private museums. We control for the most salient characteristics of a museum, competition pressure and some proxies of potential audience. Our evidence shows that private museums, public museums with financial autonomy and outsourced museums outperform public museums run as sub-units of culture departments. This paper contributes to the cultural economics and public policy and administration literature by adding insights into the effect of outsourcing and administrative decentralization in the public cultural sector.     

Learning cultural heritage by serious games

Immersive technologies such as virtual environments and augmented reality have a clear potential to support the experiencing of cultural heritage by the large public, complementing the current tools and practices based on tangible goods such as museums, exhibitions, books and visual content. Serious games – videogames designed for educational objectives – appear as a new tool to learn cultural content in an engaging way. In this paper, we will provide an extensive portrait of the current proposition of serious games in the cultural sector, highlighting the educational objectives of games in this domain and analysing the complex relations between genre, context of use, technological solutions and learning effectiveness. We finally identify and discuss the most significant challenges in the design and adoption of educational games in cultural heritage.     

Virtual museums, a survey and some issues for consideration

Museums are interested in the digitizing of their collections not only for the sake of preserving the cultural heritage, but to also make the information content accessible to the wider public in a manner that is attractive. Emerging technologies, such as VR, AR and Web3D are widely used to create virtual museum exhibitions both in a museum environment through informative kiosks and on the World Wide Web. This paper surveys the field, and while it explores the various kinds of virtual museums in existence, it discusses the advantages and limitation involved with a presentation of old and new methods and of the tools used for their creation.     

Measuring the efficiency of heritage institutions: A case study of a regional system of museums in Spain

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a widely applied tool in efficiency evaluation for public administration, yet has scarcely been put to use in the case of heritage institutions. The goal of the current paper is to evaluate the technical efficiency of a regional system of museums, the hypothesis being that these bodies represent one organization of productive resources (employment, equipment, art collections, and so on), aimed at providing various goods and services linked to their basic functions: conservation, exhibiting, research and dissemination of cultural heritage. Yet, given the diverse nature of this kind of institution, previous sorting and classification is required in order to obtain homogeneous clusters for the various elements. This research therefore merges multivariate statistical techniques to synthesise the initial information and DEA for efficiency evaluation. These findings may prove useful for management of these institutions, as well as for those responsible for public resource allocation policies in the area of cultural heritage. We apply this to a regional system of museums in Spain, which includes both rural and urban museums.     

The authenticity of the museum experience in the digital age: the case of the Louvre

The technological shift of museums is extensively documented, even if research on the impact of technologies on cultural practices and social patterns at large is still lacking. As part of a research programme conducted by the Louvre and HEC Paris, the article proposes a conceptual analysis of ‘real’ (visiting the museum) and ‘virtual’ (visiting its website) experiences of museums. It contributes to the understanding of whether the two experiences are substitutes or complements using a newly created measurement scale. In addition, the article also aims at enriching the contemporary discussion on the artworks’ aura and the authenticity of the cultural experience in the digital age.     

Theoretical aspects of physical-chemical parameters for the correct conservation of mummies on display in museums and preserved in storage rooms

This study is aimed at evaluating physical and chemical parameters which are considered as the most appropriate for the long-term preservation of mummies, distinguishing between those which are on display in museums and those which are preserved in storage rooms. The objective of this study is also to compare and discuss differences among the most widely known guidelines and norms of the field and to highlight the single phenomena which affect the decay of this kind of cultural asset.     

Measuring the relative efficiency of cultural-historical museums in Tehran: DEA approach

Heritage institutions, as one of the main aspects of culture, play an important role in economic prospect of culture by promoting tourism industry. Turning to the interpretation of culture in economic terms, the goal of this paper is to adopt a practical evaluation tool in order to assess the efficiency of heritage institutions. This study evaluates the technical efficiency of a regional system of museums in Tehran, the capital of Iran, using Data Envelopment Analysis approach. The findings may prove useful for management of these institutions in economic point of view, as well as for those responsible for public resource allocation policies in the area of cultural heritage.     

Donor governance and financial management in prominent US art museums

I study “donor governance,” which occurs when contributors to nonprofit firms place restrictions on their gifts to limit the discretion of managers. In a study of US art museums, I find that this practice has grown significantly in recent years, and it represents the largest source of permanent capital in the industry. When donor restrictions are strong, museums shift their cost structures away from administration and toward program services, and they exhibit very high savings rates, retaining in their endowments 45 cents of each incremental dollar donated. Retention rates are near zero for cash generated from other activities. Restricted donations appear to stabilize nonprofits and significantly influence their activities, but they reduce management flexibility and may contribute to lower profit margins. Rising donor governance in US art museums may represent a reaction by contributors to the industry’s high rates of financial distress, weak boards of trustees, and large private benefits of control enjoyed by managers.     

Nudging museums attendance: a field experiment with high school teens

This paper reports results from a field experiment conducted to study the effect of incentives offered to high school teens to motivate them to visit art museums. A vast literature exists on the design of incentives to modify the behavior of firms and consumers, but not much is known about incentives offered to adolescents and young adults to affect their cultural consumption behavior. Students in the first treatment receive a flier with basic information and opening hours of a main museum in Florence, Italy—Palazzo Vecchio. Students in the second treatment receive the flier and a short presentation conducted by an art expert about the exhibit; students in the third treatment, in addition to the flier and the presentation, receive also a non-financial reward in the form of extra-credit points toward their school grade. The analysis yields two main findings. First, non-financial reward is more effective at inducing the students to undertake the encouraged visit than either the simple presentation or the basic information with the flier. Second, over a longer time horizon the non-financial reward does not induce a significant change in behavior with respect to the simple presentation.     

National museums: To charge or not to charge?

This paper looks at the arguments for and against admission charges to national museums and provides some new evidence relating to the effects of charges. This debate is set in the context of the policy objective of access: the vast bulk of the population do not attend national museums and evidence on this and on the socioeconomic composition of those who attend is presented for Ireland.     

“Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow” on the implications of deaccess policies for donations to museums

Severe budget cuts in the cultural sectors of many countries have spurred disparate suggestions for alternative sources available to public institutions. Deaccessioning may be an option, although controversial, to guarantee the survival of cultural institutions. This paper addresses the consequences that deaccessioning may have on donations of artworks to museums, by developing a sequential game with incomplete information. We investigate the interactions between donors and museums, when the former is uncertain about the commitment of a museum not to deaccess part of its endowment in the future. Our analysis shows that deaccessioning may reduce art donations to museums. Interestingly, public grants to museums cause a negative externality to a committed museum, which experiences a reduction in donations. Results provide intuitions for the widespread resistance to deaccessioning of museum associations, for their efforts to enforce common regulation restricting the use of proceeds to the acquisition of art, and also for the proliferation of private art museums.     

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.     

Future pest status of an insect pest in museums,Attagenus smirnovi: Distribution and food consumption in relation to climate change

The brown carpet beetle Attagenus smirnovi, Zhantiev 1973 (Coleoptera: Dermestidae) is an important pest of objects of organic origin in museums of cultural and natural history in Europe. Future climate changes are expected to lead to increasing temperatures, which will affect the pest status of this species. In the present study a laboratory investigation was conducted to elucidate the effect of temperature and humidity on the amounts of organic material consumed by larvae of A. smirnovi. In the case of new and old skin, consumption was approximately twice as high at 28 °C compared to 20 °C. Wool was consumed in the greatest amounts: 169 mg of wool was consumed in three months by 30 A. smirnovi larvae. The expected future climate changes in Scandinavia are assumed to lead to higher temperatures in museums and stores where climate is not regulated. Updated data on the present distribution of A. smirnovi in Europe show that it is widespread and common, also in regions with a climate that does not support its survival out of doors. Thus, dispersal of this pest probably only rarely occurs by flight, but usually with human activity. Due to the widespread distribution of A. smirnovi, it is likely that damages in museums and collections in Scandinavia due to this pest will increase as climate changes come into effect.     

The Government's Choice of Bureaucratic Organisation: An Application to Italian State Museums

Italian state museums are characterised by a rigid bureaucratic structure and are almost completely financed by government transfers. In this paper we develop a simplified two-stage model in an attempt to explain how the government's preferences for differentiated museum functions may affect museum organisation. The model shows that the government prefers that complementary functions (e.g., conservation and scientific research) be produced by a single museum, whereas it prefers that substitutable functions (e.g., conservation and access by the general public) be produced by two museums. We use this prediction for an empirical analysis of the organisational structure of Italian state museums. On the basis of the unique ISTAT census of the Italian museum system, we test with two separate probit models the probability of observing in a state museum the concentration of either scientific activities of conservation and research or promotion activities for education and the general public. Higher classes of centralisation for the state museums are also considered by means of an ordered probit model. The results seem to suggest that the Italian state museum structure, as surveyed in the early 1990s, fully reflected the traditional policy model viewing museums as institutions devoted to conservation, scientific research and education. JEL-Classification: D73, Z11     

Local government allocation of cultural services

In the present paper, we analyse the allocation process for cultural services in Norwegian municipalities. The cultural sector at this administrative level is decomposed into the following eight subcategories: children’s and youth activities, libraries, cinemas, museums, arts dissemination, cultural heritage, cultural schools, and other cultural services. By means of budget shares for these eight cultural services and a residual sector consisting of all other municipal services, we estimate a system of demand relations which are interdependently linked to each other by a budget restriction. Our analyses are based on data from 409 out of 429 Norwegian municipalities during the period 2002–2010. In the empirical analyses, we mainly focus on the effects of income variation for the cultural services. We estimate effects of free income, matching grants to each sector, and user fees and other sector-specific income for each sector. We also estimate crowding-out effects for the cultural sectors of demographic variables indicating higher demand for services such as education, childcare, and health services. Our results confirm previous results. There are interesting differences within the group of cultural services, and these are partly related to different levels of national standardisation and regulation among the cultural services.     

Do museums foster innovation through engagement with the cultural and creative industries?

The recent narrative on museums as catalysts of innovation and growth considers their relations with other cultural and creative industries (CCIs) to be very important. We argue that most relations museums establish with CCI firms and institutions are unlikely to produce strong positive externalities that make the latter more innovative. To prove this claim, we propose a conceptual framework qualifying project-based and supply chain relations between museums and CCIs as either strong, moderate, or weak links, according to their potential in terms of knowledge spillovers from museums to CCIs. We apply this taxonomy to data collected from 261 Polish museums. Our findings indicate that strong links are outnumbered by moderate and weak ones. We then suggest that the traditional missions of museums, in particular education and conservation, need to be more thoroughly assessed in terms of their direct and indirect contributions in order to fully capture the impact of museums on innovation in the wider economy.

     

Travel purpose and expenditure patterns in city tourism: evidence from the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area

This study examines the expenditure patterns of urban tourists with different trip purposes including visiting cultural heritage. Expenditure categories include museums and theatres. We use a two-step approach, in which we first analyse the total daily amount of expenditure and then the budget shares of various categories. We make use of survey data collected for the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, a large Western European city known for its rich cultural heritage and the semi-legalized use of cannabis. The econometric analysis shows that trip purposes are associated with substantial differences in total daily expenditure as well as on budget shares. However, the results also show that the activities undertaken by tourists are not limited to their (initial) trip purposes.     

Contingent Valuation and Semiparametric Methods: A Case Study of the National Museum of Sculpture in Valladolid, Spain

Research on cultural economics is very interested in the economic valuation of non-market goods, particularly in the field ofcultural heritage where contingent valuation techniques are currently being used with both parametric and non-parametric statistical methods to estimate the willingness to pay for cultural goods. In the literature analysed, the number of studies using semiparametric methods, however, is very limited. Our analysis is intended to help fill this gap by offering a parametric, non-parametric and semiparametric economic valuation of the National Museum of Sculpture (Museo Nacional de Escultura), located in Valladolid,Spain. In addition, we also gain insight on a controversial issue affecting most European museums, particularly those located in Latin countries: the role voluntary donations might play in the funding of public museums.     

Cultural participation in Europe: Can we identify common determinants?

This article examines the extent to which demographic and socioeconomic characteristics influence the decision to visit and the number of visits to museums, art galleries, historical monuments, and archaeological sites. Using ordered probit models based on data for 350,000 adults in 24 EU countries, we find that the likelihood and number of such visits depend mainly on per capita household income, education, labor market status, and country of birth. Attained characteristics such as education and income have remarkably similar positive effects on cultural participation across the countries in our sample, while the effects of age and gender are both weaker and less consistent across countries. We conclude that cultural distinctions along the lines of socioeconomic attainment are stable even in very different country contexts with varying cultural policies and economic conditions. We discuss the way these results inform three research topics: identification of the characteristics of visitors to museums and historical sites in order to attract new audiences; the effect of public spending on culture on accessibility to cultural sites; and cross-national variation in cultural stratification.     

Dust and light: predictive virtual archaeology

Computer graphics, and in particular high-fidelity rendering, make it possible to recreate cultural heritage on a computer, including a precise lighting simulation. Achieving maximum accuracy is of the highest importance when investigating how a site might have appeared in the past. Failure to use such high fidelity means there is a very real danger of misrepresenting the past. Although we can accurately simulate the propagation of light in the environment, little work has been undertaken into the effect that light scattering due to participating media (such as dust in the atmosphere) has on the perception of the site. In this paper we present the high-fidelity rendering pipeline including participating media. We also investigate how the appearance of an archaeological reconstruction is affected when dust is included in the simulation. The chosen site for our study is the ancient Egyptian temple of Kalabsha.