Hobby-related information-seeking behaviour of highly dedicated online museum visitors

Introduction. This paper explores the characteristics of online museum visitors in an everyday life, informationseeking context. Method. A triangulation of research methods was applied. A Web questionnaire survey gave initial, quantitative information about online museum visitors to a military museum. Follow-up interviews (n = 24) obtained rich, qualitative data to validate and elaborate the characteristics of online museum visitors' information-seeking behaviour. Analysis. Based on the serious leisure perspective, data analysis led to the identification of two different user groups named collectors and liberal arts enthusiasts. Analysis showed that the two hobby classes have distinct profiles including differences in the nature of their knowledge acquisition. Results. Across the two hobby classes, participants can be characterised as special interest museum visitors pursuing a long-standing interest or hobby. The identified information needs were surprisingly well-defined known item needs and only few exploratory information needs were identified. Participants stressed the importance of personal channels and the social context of the hobby. Conclusions. The present study contributes to the research area of everyday life information seeking within serious leisure. It also contributes to the emerging field of museum informatics by adding to the characteristics of the online museum visitor. Hobby-related information-seeking behaviour of highly dedicated online museum visitors http://www.informationr.net/ir/18-4/paper597.html[1/5/2014 4:55:56 PM] Introduction Studies of information-seeking behaviour have long been concerned with workrelated environments and scientific users and students in particular (Butterworth and Perkins 2006, Hartel 2003, Savolainen 1995). Savolainen proposed that non-job information seeking deserves equal attention and introduces the concept of everyday life information seeking. Since then, a rich variety of everyday life information seeking themes has been explored from a number of theoretical perspectives. This paper contributes to a growing body of research on the role of information in serious leisure by investigating the everyday life information seeking behaviour of online museum visitors, with the focus on what Booth (1998) denotes as special interest museum visitors. A current trend is to make museum collections widely accessible by digitising Hobby-related information-seeking behaviour of highly dedicated online museum visitors http://www.informationr.net/ir/18-4/paper597.html[1/5/2014 4:55:56 PM] cultural heritage collections for the Internet, which builds on the idea of the visitorcentred museum (Anderson 2004). Online visits to museum Websites have become popular and some museums report that the number of online museum visitors exceeds the number of visitors to the physical museum (e.g. Fantoni et al. 2012). As a result, the importance of extending the notion of museum visitation to also cover visits to museum Websites has recently been stressed (Ellenbogen et al. 2008, Fantoni et al. 2012, Marty 2008, Marty 2011) together with a call for a broader research perspective on online museum visitation (Ellenbogen et al. 2008, Falk et al. 2008, Marty 2008). Accordingly, this paper studies the characteristics of the online museum visitor and three factors are explored: information needs, seeking and use. Understanding online museum visitor behaviour is critical to the development of relevant and useful museum Websites. Further, the paper explores how to categorise online museum visitors within Stebbins's (2007) taxonomy of classes of leisure pursuit, and links this to patterns in the role of information seeking. The following research questions guided the study: 1. How can online museum visitors be categorised within Stebbins's taxonomy of classes of leisure pursuit? 2. What characterises the information-seeking behaviour of online museum visitors? Particular attention was given to: their information-related leisure tasks and derived information needs the information channels and sources used. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. First, a review of the previous research on everyday life information seeking from a serious leisure perspective and studies of online museum visitor behaviour are presented. Next, the methodology of the empirical study is presented and the data collections methods regarding the Web questionnaire survey and the qualitative interviews are described. The following section presents and discusses the results of the study, and the final section concludes the article and makes recommendations for future research.