Investigating online user groups for digital cultural heritage: a study of National Museums Liverpool

This study seeks to fill a gap in the field of virtual museum visitors by providing a more comprehensive understanding of different user groups and exploring the creation of a tool for future researchers and museum professionals to quickly gather and analyse user groups in their own studies. This study aimed to identify the information-seeking characteristics of different user groups for museum websites through the investigation of seven research questions. The first research question focused on the identification of the main user group categories present in the Digital Cultural Heritage literature. The literature review revealed a lack of a comprehensive approach to the identification and use of a group label. The second research question explored the similarities, shared characteristics, and differences of the identified groups, revealing that attempting to define a label through literature via its characteristics proved difficult. The third and fourth research questions examined how user groups are defined based on survey responses and how they compare to those in the literature, finding that the “general public” and “non-professional” visitors make up nearly 80% of all visitors. The fifth research question compared user groups identified in the transaction logs to those in the literature and survey results, suggesting that focusing on labelled user groups may not be the most effective approach. The sixth research question identified user groups from survey responses using the PAM clustering method, resulting in a set of more distinguishable user
groups. The final research question focused on how comprehensive user group definitions can be generated from the cluster results, producing more detailed and actionable user group definitions.