Museums yet to embrace the digital age: the presence of Catalan museums on the internet

Catalonia has a network of over 500 museums and collections open to the public. During 2013 they welcomed over 20 million people through their doors. However, this wide network is not always visible on the internet, where Catalan museums show significant variations in their levels of online presence. The article analyses how various public museums and collections in Catalonia made use of the internet as a way of interacting with the public. Our study analyses email, webpages and social networks, and includes all the Catalan centres, with special attention given to those of most relevance. The results show how there are still great variations in the online presences of Catalan museums and collections. There is a significant number of institutions without a direct presence on the internet, while others are very active. Email is the most common tool, despite not being used to interact with the public. Use of webpages is relatively widespread, while the presence on social networks is still very limited, as regards both the number of institutions present and the amount of content published. This is an element that influences the number of followers each centre has and the impact they can generate by this means.