Pain points of cultural institutions in search visibility: the case of Serbia
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-12-2017-0264 |
| Date | 16 September 2019 |
| Published date | 16 September 2019 |
| Pages | 496-512 |
| Author | Nataša Krstić,Dejan Masliković |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Librarianship/library management,Library technology,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information user studies,Metadata,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Pain points of cultural
institutions in search visibility:
the case of Serbia
Nataša Krstić
Faculty of Media and Communications, Univerzitet Singidunum,
Belgrade, Serbia, and
Dejan Masliković
Department for Development of Digital Research Infrastructure,
Ministry of Culture and Media, Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to identify the common issues affecting the cultural institutions’
websites in terms of organic search visibility and to detect if there are some category specifics for the national
libraries, archives and museums.
Design/methodology/approach –In the first phase, an online survey was conducted involving the cultural
institutions of national importance, aiming to map the current state of their websites in organizational and
functional terms, to collect the information about the used domains, their social media activity and the use of
analytical tools to monitor the visitor behavior and online traffic. In the second phase, the cultural institutions’
websites were analyzed using the “White Hat SEO”technics of optimization on Google.
Findings –From the category perspective, the historical archives have the best Technical search engine
optimization (SEO) position due to the low coding errors and fair site speed, the libraries are leading in content
generation and the museums have a very good total SEO index due to their strong social media activities.
Common issues are detected in the description of web images, non-existence of sitemaps and low website
mobile friendliness.
Research limitations/implications –The data were collected from the personnel of the national cultural
institutions based on their pre-assumed knowledge and understanding of website management.
Practical implications –The research methodology can be used to analyze the organic visibility of any
national culture on search engines.
Originality/value –A research gap in addressing the cultural institutions’websites from the search engine
perspective was identified and addressed within the paper.
Keywords Websites, Last KW, Search engines, Search engine optimization, Cultural institutions, Online visitors
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Cultural institutions are about the material they contain. The first duty of the management and
curatorsis to look after that material. The second duty is to makethat material accessible to whoever
wants to see it Sir David Wilson, former Director of the British Museum (Wilson, 1991, p. 11).
Due to the long-standing crisis and the government efforts to achieve economic
consolidation, culture has not been a priority in Serbia for years. The allocation from the
state budget for the culture amounts to only 0.81 percent of the GDP (Ministry of Finance
Serbian Government, 2015), compared with Hungary as a neighboring country –2.1 percent
and the European Union average of 1.1 percent (Eurostat, 2017)[1]. Consequently, the
majority of the national cultural institutions have been in the stage of hibernation, facing
scarce new projects and visitors. Taking into account that approximately 60 percent of the
cultural institutions’revenues globally are gained via subsidies and donations with
40 percent from ticket sales and one-third from store sales (Yeh and Lin, 2005), the Serbian
national culture has been stranded in the long-term survival mode. Because of the reduced
funding from cultural budgets and the growing competition in the recreational marketspace
Library Hi Tech
Vol. 37 No. 3, 2019
pp. 496-512
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0737-8831
DOI 10.1108/LHT-12-2017-0264
Received 4 December 2017
Revised 18 May 2018
21 June 2018
Accepted 27 June 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0737-8831.htm
496
LHT
37,3
worldwide (Kotler and Rentschler, 2003), the cultural institutions have been facing the
increasing pressure to attract wider audiences, increase visitation and their overall visibility.
This requires the identification of opportunities such as online channels that can improve
awareness, expand capacities for visitation and increase the core offering (Hume and Mills,
2011). For that reason, visits to the cultural institutions’websites have become increasingly
popular, and in some cases the number of online visitors exceeds the number of physical
ones (Fantoni et al., 2012). Virtual visits do not only compensate for the decline in physical
visits, but also lead to better-prepared visitors (Voorbij, 2010), or to the post-visit experience
(Marty, 2007). There is a great potential for cross-promoting and cross-fertilizing audiences,
as those engaged in arts and culture online are also engaged in arts and culture offline
(Arts Council England, MLA and Arts and Business, 2010, p. 17).
Lately, the efforts have been made globally toward the digitalization of the national
cultural heritage (CH), the digitized representations of physical objects and the enhancement
of their online visibility on the internet (Petras et al., 2017). The major aim of such initiatives
is to create awareness, enhance branding, boost interest and synergistically contribute to
the increase of online visits to the cultural institutions (Hume and Mills, 2011;
Padilla-Meléndez and Del Águila-Obra, 2013; Skov and Ingwersen, 2014). Establishing
partnerships with the donor community, the business sector, and other online cultural
projects such as the Europeana[2], the Google Arts & Culture[3], the Online Computer
Library Center[4] or the Google Books Library Project[5] are also in favor of strengthening
the online presence of cultural institutions and CH visibility. The prerequisite for the
digitalization of the CH, in addition to the copyright issues on the internet and the existence
of appropriate hardware and software, is the platform for displaying the artifacts online –at
the institutional websites. If their webpages are not visible to search engine crawlers due to
some technical factors, not relevant to user queries due to the absence of keyword strategy,
and not authoritative with backlinks from referrals and follower engagement on social
media, their online visibility would be low.
Through our cabinet research, we found several academic studies on cultural institution’s
websites, with most of them considering usability and accessibility, followed by content,
presentation and technical characteristics (Kabassi, 2017; Pallas and Economides, 2008). Some of
the studies are related to the social media deployment, which is used for dissemination of
information and engagement with the cultural public (Bountouri and Giannakopoulos, 2014;
Kelly, 2009; Kidd, 2011; Pallas and Economides, 2008). However, the impact on cultural websites
from the search engine optimization (SEO) perspective remains mainly untapped in academic
research. In that respect, SEO is defined as the implementation of practices aimed at making the
websites friendly to search engine crawlers and improving their visibility on the search engine
results pages (SERP) (Dickinson and Smit, 2015, p. 11). SEO is especially important having in
mind that the visitors’online activity is mostly focused on searching for information (about
artists/performers and events), the search engines being the most common method of active
discovery, even across older age groups (Arts Council England, MLA and Arts and Business,
2010, p. 27). Google and its various domains (Scholar, Images, News, etc.) drive more traffic to
cultural institutions’websites and digital repositories than any other source. As a result, it is not
only useful to incorporate SEO practices that help Google to reach, harvest and understand
cultural institutions’web presence, but it is also important to pay attention and act accordingly
when the search engine recommends changes to website practices (Askey and Arlitsch, 2014,
p. 57). In addition, according to Skov and Ingwersen (2014), the most common reasons for
visiting the cultural institutions’websites belong to the following motivational categories (p. 92):
•gathering information to plan an upcoming visit (opening hours, admissions, etc.);
•self-motivated research for specific content information;
•assigned research (school or job assignments) for specific content information;
497
Pain points of
cultural
institutions in
search visibility
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