Is the web taking visitors away from museums? Apparently not, if we shall believe a recent study from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US) which concludes that “the amount of use of the Internet is positively correlated with the number of in-person visits to museums and has a positive effect on in-person visits to public libraries.” For an overview of the study we are referred to this powerpoint (it didn’t load when I tried, however; added 23 March: one has to save the file to one’s harddrive first …).
(thanks to Im in ur museum blogz by Lynn Bethke, also author of ‘Constructing Connections: A Museological Approach to Blogging’, her Masters’ thesis, which should in principle be is downloadable here but unfortunately wasn’t available today).
Another question is what the two genres can learn from each other—see our earlier posts here and here.