How could Museums improve their digital collections for new online audiences? Some suggestions from an empirical survey with Gen-Z students

The empirical research, conducted in May 2023 at the University of Bari (Italy), within the European project ‘Cultural Heritage Active Innovation for Sustainable Society – CHANGES’ code n. PE00000020 - CUP: H53C22000860006, analyzed how Gen-Z students in Museology approach museums digital collections after their online lockdown experiences. The theoretical framework of this research based on the Museum of Connection model and starts from the question: are museums understanding how young online audiences approach their digital ecosystem, of which digital collections are a key component? This theoretical framework was the premise to allow students to acquire skills for an evaluation workshop. By answering a questionnaire, the empirical analysis concerned the perception of 30 international and Italian museums’ web strategies. Following the qualitative analyses, led in classroom and at home and then presented by each student to the others, by browsing the selected museums’ websites, a real collective and participatory brainstorming started, from which a qualitative evaluation derived for 34 criteria (from usability to digital collections to communication on social media). While the general research on all the analyzed criteria is going to be published, this paper will, instead, analytically describe the single “online collection” criterion, according to 24 sub-criteria (from navigation usability to digital co-curation solutions of the online collections). As direct users of digital cultural content, through students’ experiences we want to provide a general indication useful to show how much is necessary overthrowing the mindset, to fill the gap between perception, reality and desire for museums digital collections, and their communication, attractiveness, and interaction with young potential visitors.