Objectives

Objectives research

As an independent non-profit organisation the Europeana Foundation works with thousands of European archives, libraries and museums to share all kinds of cultural heritage – mostly for (re)creation, education and research. The website gives a worldwide audience free access to millions of books, music, artworks and more. The main aim of the foundation is to develop expertise, tools and policies to drive digital change and foster partnerships that foster (digital) innovation within the European cultural sector.

Europeana website

The group of users of the Europeana website is hybrid, a group in which professional and recreational use often overlap. Although the target groups differ in use, you basically want to further improve the experience and engagement of all users. In this research, users are defined as (incidental) visitors of the website (defined as visitors) and subscribers of the Europeana newsletter (defined as members). To target the latter group we send a personal invitation to participate in the survey to all subscribers of the Europeana newsletter. To target the visitors we used a pop-up leading to the same questionnaire.

For the Europeana website users, the emphasis of the research will be on the overall members and visitors profile (who are they?), awareness (how they became familiar with the website?), content development (what are their content needs?) and website development (how are the practical aspects of the website assessed?).

How do the question points, as described earlier, contribute to answering the main questions of the whole project, namely how do they contribute to a better user experience and engagement? The statement ‘the better the user experience, the greater the user engagement’ is a proverbial ‘open door’ but which factors exactly contribute to increasing the user experience?

Knowing your audience

First of all it is important to know your audience by profiling them. By creating a user profile (for both the members and visitors) and mapping how they know the Europeana website (awareness) Europeana can increase the public reach of the website among potential users with the same profile. With the profiling we can also check what the overlap is between the users of Europeana and the users of Europeana Pro. In other words: how many and to what extent 'Pro-users' are also visitors to Europeana? Finally: improving the satisfaction level of the content, usability and experience of the website will also lead to an increase of the engagement. The outline of the questionnaire is shown on the next slide.

Research pending

In this report of the first results are shown of the members-group. Fieldwork is conducted from the 29th of September till the 19th of October 2021 (n=963 completes). The pop-up was published on the (...) of October and the fieldwork of this part of the survey is still running.