2012

Inversions
The viability of research museums in the Modern

University College London Institute of Archaeology Tobias Bowman

Tobias Bowman
University College London: Institute of Archaeology.
1/5/2012

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Inversions:
The viability of research museums in the Modern Age

Tobias Bowman

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of

BSc Archaeology
of University College London in 2012
UCL INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Tobias Bowman | University College London Institute of Archaeology

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Note; This dissertation is an unrevised examination copy for consultation only and it
should not be quoted or cited without permission of the Head of Department.

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ABSTRACT

Contents

Tobias Bowman | University College London Institute of Archaeology

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The Internet is an increasingly relevant element in todays way of life, and the way people interact with and use
the internet is changing over time. Research oriented museums (predominantly teaching collections) are
increasingly using the internet to improve the services that they offer to researchers. Is this adoption of the
internet as a medium for museum expansion a good idea? With the development of online catalogues and virtual
tours, is there really a need to visit the museum in the first place, when the research can be done at home? This
study considers two museums in detail: The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and the Grant Museum of
Zoology. The findings are unexpected; as their online presence has grown, and the utility of the websites has
increased, the real world museums have become more popular, more people are using the museums than ever,
pointing to a bright future. However, it is not quite that simple: there may be change on the horizon, research
museums may not be safe forever, and the relationship between the virtual and the real may not be quite what it
seems CONTENTS

Abstract - 3
Contents - 4
List of Illustrations - 5
Acknowledgments - 6
Chapter 1: Introduction The Desert of the Real. - 7
Chapter 2: Method and Techniques A Web We Weave - 11
Chapter 3: Hypothesis The Madding Crowd - 13
Chapter 4: Data Analysis Revolution or Evolution? - 15
Chapter 5: Evaluation Of Mice and Men - 27
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Chapter 6: Conclusions Fall Out - 31

Appendices - 34
Bibliography - 37

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES

Frontispiece: A map of the World Wide Web as it existed in 2005, Picture made
1
available via a Creative Commons Licence from the Opte Project,
(The Opte Project, 2005)
Table 1: The top 15 most used directories of the U.C.L collections website in
15
2001, which incorporated WebPages for each U.C.L run museum and
collection and the Petrie online catalogue (/images) (Webtrends, 2001, 79)
Table 2: The top 20 most used directories of the UCL collections website in
16
2002, which incorporated webpages for each U.C.L run museum and
collection and the Petrie online catalogue (/images) (Webtrends, 2002, 99-100)
Table 3: Number of searches in the Online catalogues of the Petrie and the
17
Grant from 2008 2011. (Washington, 2012b)
Table 4: individual page view requests for the Petrie and Grant museum
18
websites, including the catalogues. (ibid)
Figure 1: A pie chart showing the percentages of each country that hosts
19
domains from which the UCL Museums and Collections websites (including
the Grant and the Petrie) were accessed between January 1 2008 and March
1 2012.
Figure 2: Pie charts showing the gender and age distribution of members
20
across Facebook (Burbary, 2011).
Table 5: Basic usage data for the Petries V2 catalogue between 2003 and
21
2011 (Washington, 2012d)
Table 6: Queries on the Petrie online catalogue by field and type (Washington, 2012d)
23
Figure 3: A chart showing the changes in the total usership of the real world
24
Grant Museum of Zoology (Ashby, 2012, 1)
Figure 4: A chart showing the changes in the number of researchers using the
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Grant Museum of Zoology built from data collected for the period 2003-2011 (ibid)
Figure 5: A chart showing the changes in the total usership of the real world
26
Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology (offsite visits excluded) built from
data collated for the period 2007-10 (Challis, 2011, 1-3; Golding, 2012a; Golding 2012b).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The nature of this particular project means that it is very much a collaborative enterprise. A great many
individuals have contributed something towards its realisation. Without the help of any one of these the whole
thing would have fallen apart, and I would like to express my gratitude for the helpfulness, kindness and
diligence shown by everyone that I have had to contact on this potholed journey. First and foremost I should like
to thank Dr. Joe Flatman, my supervisor, for providing much needed ideas, reassurances and support. Similarly I
would like to thank Corinna Riva, Dissertation Tutor, for pointing me in the right direction when I needed it and
Alison Weisskopf, my personal tutor, for her kind assistance, and for bearing with me while I roamed the halls of
the Web trying to piece this thing together.
My deepest thanks also go to the many employees of UCL and the Grant and Petrie who have tirelessly worked
to help me with my research, chiefly among which are Sam Washington; Digital Resources Manager for UCL
Museums & Collections, Jack Ashby; Acting Manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology and Nick Dawe; UCL
Museums & Collections Digital Media Manager. In addition to this triumvirate however are numerous other
names of people without whom this work would have been literally impossible; Debbie Challis (Audience
Development Officer, Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology), Andrew Gardner (I.o.A), Tracey Golding
(Visitor Services Officer, PMEA), Donna Lanclos (University Of North Carolina at Charlotte), Sally MacDonald
(Director, UCL Museums & Collections), Katie Meheux (Issue Desk Head, Institute of Archaeology Library),
Sonja Van Praag (ISD Silva Support), Bill Sillar (I.o.A), Kathy Tubb, (for asking nasty questions and making me
think (I.o.A)), Hannah Umar, (Departmental Administrator, UCL Museums & Collections) and Celine West
(Head of Learning and Access, UCL Museums & Collections). If I have missed anyone its nothing personal, but
there are a lot of you.
Special thanks to Judy Medrington, for being Judy Medrington.
My thanks must similarly go to several friends and colleagues whom have provided suggestions and criticisms
throughout, and have directly contributed to the improvement of the dissertation; Dexter Findley, a fellow
undergraduate at the Institute, Georgina Nightingall, an undergraduate student of Philosophy at the University of
Edinburgh, Ryan Wood, an undergraduate student of Physics at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford
and Christopher Dean, an undergraduate student of Geology at Imperial College London. They have all been
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pillars of strength to me in times of hardship and their assistance has been instrumental over the past few
months.
Particularly special thanks for my Mother, for providing moral support and suggesting synonyms and to my
Father for reading through many drafts, making suggestions, providing reading and adding occasional madness
to my dissertation, without their support this would have never gotten off the ground, and I am eternally grateful
to both of them.
Acknowledgements to Sian Bayne, Jen Ross and Zoe Williamson of the University of Edinburgh, for writing the
only article on this topic that I agree with.
My thanks also go to Microsoft, for devising a word processor oriented entirely around giving me stuff to do.

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
THE DESERT OF THE REAL.
To the casual observer, a museum is an easily defined entity. It is a physical place wherein physical fragments of
the past are stored. Old things are kept in museums, and people can go there to look at them (Low, 2004, 30
[1940]). This image spawns from the earliest antiquarian collections and cabinets of curios which, in one form or
another, have existed for centuries. Over the course of the past sixty years or so, since the origins of processualist
archaeology, the nature of museums has increasingly deviated from this casual image (Fleming, 2005, 1).
Museums are no longer a place where old things are kept, and the way in which people are exposed to the
physical remains of the past has changed in recent years (Renfrew et. al, 2008, 49). Many museums began to
publicise themselves as places where children could be educated outside of the classroom, an appealing and
quite novel concept in the 1960s (Merriman, 2004, 85, 88; Bayne et. al. 2009, 110). As a result many museums
grew substantially as large numbers of visitors arrived in the holidays, and to maintain and further their
popularity, these museums worked to increase their mass accessibility, public profile and popularity (Reussner
refers to them as Visitor-Oriented Museums(2003, 1)). The discipline of Museum Studies has developed in the
last 20 or 30 years or so as a result, and study of the nature of museums has changed that very nature by making
museums more aware of both their shortcomings as public fora and their potential for growth (Renfrew et. al,
2008, 571). Other museums developed along a different path, catering to the increasing number of students
wanting to use them as an interactive database, where research could be facilitated and new data generated
without the need for costly and increasingly complex excavations. These research museums (or as Merriman
refers to them, Archaeological Museums (2004, 86-87)) did not draw large numbers of people in the holidays,
and their public profile was minimal, but they were fulfilling a different function, imparting more information to
far fewer people. It is with this growth, development and schism in the nature of museums that we arrive at the
kind of museums which are being examined here, the second of the two mentioned types - research museums.
Increasingly, museums are facing pressure to attract as many visitors and as much attention as possible, because
for many, their funding is either directly from visitors, or is apportioned according to visitor numbers (around
47% of museums in England charge admission from visitors, the rest are sponsored, and for many that
sponsorship can be affected by the popularity of the museum) (Matty, 2005, 6). As a result, all museums, both
research and tourist (Visitor-Oriented (Reussner, 2003, 1)) are being forced to increase the degree to
which they interact with the public. The environment in which this interaction is taking place more and more

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frequently is virtual, predominantly the internet and the World Wide Web. This study examines the effects of this
increased dependence upon the virtual world.
Museums took to the virtual world after many other commercial enterprises (Kelly, 2010, 406), but some
museums have had a virtual presence since the dawn of the internet, when it was still a limited data-swapping
tool available to the select few with a computer and an internet connection. Whilst the first few museums to have
websites were in the United States (The Smithsonian Institution and the Dallas Museum of Art being amongst
the first with websites in 1995 and 1998 - respectively) amongst the first museums in the U.K to have a website
was the British Museum, which built its first website in 2000. Museum websites, like most websites in the early
days of the internet, were difficult to use and understand and did little to enhance a museums profile. However,
when their importance increased, following the internet revolution, the emphasis on a developed virtual
presence became more important (Russo, 2011, 327). The Internet Revolution was exemplified by a paradigm
shift in the way that people living in the western world expressed themselves, communicated with each other and
consumed digital media. This shift was catalysed by the rise of broad-bandwidth internet and exemplified by the
development of Tim OReillys conceptual Web 2.0, the rise of virtual memetics and user defined weblogs
(OReilly, 2005) . The increased use and reliance upon the web by organisations and individuals, and recontextualisation and reformation of knowledge facilitated by web 2.0 (Bayne et. al. 2009, 110), meant that
museums without a website soon began to fall behind in terms of public profile as the onus switched towards
checking the internet for advice on places to go for tourists, or for sources of valuable data for researchers, as
well as using it to contribute information and ideas (Pes, 2009, 39). One of the foremost media for reaching
members of the public now is a museum blog (weblog), such as the UCL Museums and Collections blog or the
British Museum Blog (Kelly, 2010, 406; Russo et. al. 2008, 21-23)
Many museums therefore began to develop a second self within the virtual world, a reflection, in part, of that
museum as it existed in the real world. Museums increasingly became more than just a physical entity; there
existed the real museum, a place which contained things and its Web based counterpart, which showed the
museum to the world. This counterpart could advertise features of the museum to increase its popularity, or
house tools for increasing the amount of useful information that someone can draw from the museum. When
considering a modern museum therefore one must consider the entity as a whole, virtual and real. This is because
they are not necessarily reflections of one another, a museums web image may drastically differ from its real
world impact upon individual and academic perspectives. In the case of research museums, by far the most
important aspect of this virtual presence was an online catalogue, which held the essence of the museum within a
virtual medium and allowed people to explore the contents of the museum without visiting it in real life.
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The increased versatility and popularity of the internet meant that more and more museums in the U.K
developed a website between 2000 and the present day. Museums which were part of existing educational bodies
(e.g. universities) were among the first to develop websites. Over time, these websites grew to incorporate a
component which, for a research museums web presence, is considered the most crucial: an online catalogue. As
the majority of university-run museums are research oriented (a greater focus being on facilitating under and
post graduate level study than on drawing large numbers of people though the doors), they provide a convenient
window into the development both of research museum websites in the 21 st century, and, provide a relatively
homogeneous baseline upon which to build comparative frameworks, examining the usage patterns of those
museums and their websites, especially the virtualisation of a museums contents, the online catalogue.
The facilitation of good research offered by examining university-run Museums means that it will be two such
museums that form the case studies for this work. The Grant Museum of Zoology and the Petrie Museum of
Egyptian Archaeology are both Research Museums managed by, and a part of, University College London.
Both museums will provide a datum point, from which inferences about the nature of the relationship between
the virtual museum and the physical can be sought. The relatively long period for which these museums have
had websites as part of UCL (since 31/8/2000 for the Petrie and 27/1/2001 for the Grant (the second earliest)
(using information generated by the Wayback Machine internet archive)) gives a good depth of data for site use.
In addition, the affiliation of the Museums with the University means that there is some regulation of statistical
data collected by them, providing a source of viable demographic data for the use of the museums in the real
world, which can then be compared to the web data. The Petrie was also among the first museums in the UK to
develop an online catalogue, which is potentially a key factor in influencing the way research museums are used
in the real world, the first Petrie catalogue went online on the 25/4/2002 (Washington, 2012; Appendix 1).
The Petrie Museum was founded as a learning resource for UCL from the archaeological collection of Emilia
Edwards in 1892. Whilst the Museum was originally research based, and not open to the general public, in the
early 20th century it opened to the public and became a museum as would be recognised today (Golding, 2012).
The sale of Petries collection in 1913 to the museum greatly enhanced the status and size of its collection and its
popularity grew. And after the Second World War the collection was moved to the structure in which it resides
today. Its status as one of the foremost collections of Egyptian material outside of Egypt has meant that academic
interest has remained high at the museum to the present day, providing an insight into the adoption of the internet
as a research tool over time. It was the First UCL run Museum to develop an online catalogue (Washington,
2012).
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The Grant Museum of Zoology was founded by Robert Grant in 1827 as a teaching collection (a function which
the Grant and other modern research Universities still serve) for UCL. On his death he left his collected works
and samples to the university, and they were added to the museums already significant collection. The museum
continued to grow as a part of UCL and is now thriving following its opening to the public every day whilst
predominantly remaining a teaching and research collection. The museums success has led to its relocation to a
new, larger site in march of 2011 (Cain, 2012, 1, 3, 9, 10). The Grant was the second UCL run museum- after
the Petrie in 2002, to develop an online catalogue, in 2008 (Washington, 2012).
Both Museums have developed their websites since their inception, whilst keeping records of variable quality on
those websites uses. As the utilisation of those websites has increased over time with more and more visitors
(Washington, 2012b) the size of those websites and their significance has grown. The virtual aspects of both the
Grant and the Petrie are increasingly substantial and it is hoped that a synoptic analysis of both the development
of their virtual presences and their physical, real-world presences, will yield viable results and practically
applicable hypotheses.
Research question
What is the relationship between the development of a research museums online services, and the
nature of the museums utilisation in real life?
The interplay between the virtual and physical aspects of research museums are being examined in this research.
In as succinct a question as possible, it is hoped that the nature of the interactive universe (i.e. the summation
of all the different ways in which people can interact with the museum on some level, and vice versa) of research
museums can be assessed, with the aim of providing suggestions for the future concerning the relevance of a
developed universal existence.

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY AND PRACTICE

A WEB WE WEAVE
This research will generate viable results by analysing data from both the Museums websites and the
demographic data. The intention is to draw together specific pieces of data from all the available strands to build
up an impression of the reality of the relationship between the real and the virtual, and use that image to either
prove or disprove the current hypothesis (see chapter 3). Data collection must, for the electronic data entirely,
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and for the real world visitor data predominantly, come from other people (referenced where necessary and listed
in the Acknowledgements section). To collect data oneself from the websites and server logs of the Grant and
Petrie museums would not only require direct access to the servers (and the ability to access the data therein) but
also access to data held by web analytics companies, who would not release said data freely, and acquisition of
which would constitute a crime. Therefore the people that have access to the web data are the only means by
which that data can be collected. This introduced a potential bias, should certain individuals choose to withhold
data.
Regardless, all of the virtual museum data and most of the real world data was made available through a third
party, and thus the research is dependent on them. Whilst real world data (visitor counts, basic demographic date
etc.) can be gathered personally, it cannot be gathered for past visitors, and so for survey data from previous
years the records of the museum are the only recourse. The sources of the data mean that there are gaps, as some
data has been lost, or perhaps never collected in the first place. However, there is a prodigious amount of data
available and it will be possible to collect data from both museums concerning specific factors and generating a
cohesive pattern. These patterns will be used to build up a detailed representation of the interplay between the
development, adoption and use of the virtual aspect of both of the museums and the physical, real world utility
of them. This will mean that through comparison of individual statistics provided by third parties, a conclusion
can be drawn which answers the research question.
Collecting the data proved more complex than originally envisaged, different people held different pieces of data
and it took some time to develop an understanding of who had what, and even longer to persuade those
individuals to part with their data (in most cases, around four months of repeated requests for data were fruitless)
however, in order to gain as unbiased a dataset as possible, it was ensured that each individual would be asked
for their data for the same reasons and in the same register, so as to minimise the amount of bias introduced by
the request (see appendix 2). This meant that when the data did start coming in, there was some uncertainty from
the providers as to how much data would be finally available to the study, and what conclusions could be drawn
because none of them knew who had access to what, or even if some data existed. A sufficiently broad range of
data from both the Grant and the Petrie however has meant that the data corpus has reached critical mass and
can be analysed successfully.
Whilst the available data corpus is significant, it is also unbalanced, with large amounts of data for certain
factors (such as site visits over time) and comparatively little for others, such as proportions of each file type
downloaded from total downloads (a potentially vital and interesting area of study). Therefore statistics for each
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factor will be treated as separate datasets, and only those where there is data for both the real world museum and
the website for the same period of time, and for both museums, will be used. This will prevent spikes of data
concerning one element for one aspect of a single museum from having too great an effect on the final image as,
without a point of comparison, the data could be skewed or otherwise inaccurate, corrupting the final result.
This methodology is aimed at creating as reliable a model as possible by removing uncorroborated data, which
will assist the application of the resulting conclusions to other museums in the future and making the research
sustainable (i.e. suitable to be added to and expanded upon in the future, and to be eventually replaced by a
more coherent and accurate model). It is hoped that in chapters 4 and 5, the degree to which this has been
successful is adequately evaluated.

CHAPTER 3: HYPOTHESIS
THE MADDING CROWD
This paper will compare its findings against an hypothesis proposed here concerning the nature of the
relationship between online and real world services of museums based upon available literature concerning
this relationship. Assuming a division within museums between those angled towards attracting tourists and
those oriented primarily towards facilitating research, those museums facilitating research will provide a wider
reaching and more helpful service by developing their virtual presence, specifically their online catalogue, but
doing so will depreciate the utility and popularity of the real-world museum. In other words; the more research
that can be done online, the less will be done in the museum. Subsequent analysis of data will elucidate this
matter and determine whether this hypothesis is a reflection of the truth or not.
Its assumed that the relationship between a museums real world use and its virtual growth mirrors that of
other organisations. For 25 years, the interactions between Internet, the World Wide Web and peoples lives have
been studied from many different perspectives. The perspective of the museum is one that is little explored, the
best U.K data appears to be in Mattys MLA report in 2005 (8-12), subsequent reports avoid web analysis, citing
lack of national consistency and poor reliability. Better data appears Griffiths et. al. (2008), a report for the
Institute of Museum and Library Services, which concludes that the online museum is a boon to real world
services. The IMLS report concluded that the development of a museums virtual space increases its real world
popularity. The Matty report (2005) doesnt go so far as to draw clear cut conclusions, but the associated report
by Davies et. al (2001, 61) does conclude that integration of the virtual aspect to a museum enhances the
experience gained from its use and the museum itself.
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A report by Bayne et. al. (2009) in the journal Museum and Society, touches on the interface between the real
and the virtual in a museum environment. Taking three different museums as examples and studying the way that
the digitisation of their collections has affected them. Concluding that Museums need to take a more active rle
in engaging with the advantages offered by digitising their collections (such as increased public access) in order
to benefit, but must be wary that current drawbacks, primarily the loss of control over the artefacts and the
knowledge they represent, if left unchecked could cause museums to become less relevant over time (Bayne et.
al. 2009, 120)
The IMLS report and the Museums Association report (Resource, 2001) agree that the internet is a good thing
for most museums, whilst the Bayne et. al. article suggests that it can and should be a good thing, assuming
proactive museum management. Other organisations have found using the internet conducive to growth, indeed
the corollary; that a lack of online presence is damaging to popularity, appears to be irrefutable for most modern
organisations, particularly those in retail (dotCommerce, 19, 2012). However research museums are
predominantly educational, and as such a museums virtual presence grows, so does that presences educational
value (Bayne et. al., 2009, 110). This unusual position means it could be inferred that unlike most commercial
organisations (and some more Visitor-Oriented museums (British Museum, 2011, 22; (Reussner, 2003, 1)), the
development of a research museums online presence could detract from its real world popularity and usefulness.
The disparity between the articles conclusions and this inference suggests that research museums could benefit
from virtual development. However, the IMLS report discusses all museums, research and tourist, and the
Matty report (2005) (and the referential Renaissance in the Regions (Resource, 2001)), whilst considering a
broad range of rural and city-centre museums does not concern research museums as separate entities. Both the
reports treat all museums as one, with similar goals and visitors. There is room therefore for a study of research
museums as a discrete subset of the greater museum complex and, potentially, a realisation that previous
conclusions as to the nature of the relationship between the virtual and the real are not entirely accurate.

CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS

REVOLUTION OR EVOLUTION?
In this chapter, some samples of the data collected will be examined in detail, in an attempt to highlight strengths
and flaws in the hypothesis. The hypothesis is that real world usage of research museums is going to show a
negative correlation to the development of that museums online profile. The data available for the museums on
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the World Wide Web will be examined first, and then the real world data will be integrated once a basic
concept of the development of the websites has been generated.
As mentioned above, The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology was the first UCL run museum to develop an
online catalogue from 2002. At that point the Petrie website was the only site for UCL Museums and collections,
there are multiple reports available from those first few years, generated by the Analog web analytics software.

Table 1: The top 15 most used directories of the U.C.L collections website
in 2001, which incorporated WebPages for each U.C.L run museum and
collection and the Petrie online catalogue (/images) (Webtrends, 2001, 79)
These reports highlight the early development pattern of a Research museums online presence. They also cover
the point where the Petrie put its catalogue online for the first time. In table 1 it can be seen that in 2001 (the
earliest data available) the Petrie was one of the least popular sites within the UCL collections site, which by
2001, incorporated almost all the museums in the University. This is partially because the Petrie website was relaunched in 2001, and the usage data for the first incarnation is lost. This data was collected very shortly after the
new Petrie website (here called /petrie2) was put up. However, there are several key factors highlighted in this
table, the new Grant Museum website was very popular and was receiving a lot of hits, a number which could
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increase over the coming years (see table 2). This trend continues into 2002, with the new Petrie website
remaining far less popular than the Grant. This however may be explained by understanding that the Grant
museum did not have an online catalogue at this point, all of the museums virtual presence was contained within
its domain (/zoology). However the Petrie did have an online catalogue at this point (2002), and the bulk of the
catalogues contents were held within the /images domain. As no other museum had an online catalogue at this
point it is not unreasonable (but it is unverifiable with the data available) to assume that the bulk of the /images
domain access, the single most popular directory of the collections internet hub both in 2001 and 2002, was
access to the Petrie online catalogue.
In Table 2 it can
be seen that the
Petrie website
was again relaunched by
2002, with its
own independent
domain, separate
from the UCL
Collections
www hub. It was
at this point that
the first online
catalogue was
put on the
website, and the
sharp increase in
hits for the
/

images domain
may be a
reflection of
Table 2: The top 20 most used directories of the UCL collections website
in 2002, which incorporated webpages for each U.C.L run museum and
collection and the Petrie online catalogue (/images) (Webtrends, 2002,
99-100).
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Petrie
catalogue was

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independent to the www.petrie.ucl.ac.uk website and would not be changed in any way until January 2011, when
it was retired and replaced with a brand new catalogue on the Adlib Internet Server 3 web application. The
original catalogue therefore existed in the same format (though the domain changed in 2010 to be a completely
standalone catalogue) for 9 years, and its growth in popularity shown by Table 3 over that time can be set against
the real world visitor data, which sadly only stretches back until 2003 for the Grant and 2004 for the Petrie.

Table 3: Number of searches in the Online catalogues of the Petrie and the Grant from 2008 2011. The drastic increase

The online catalogue appears to be an important part of the Petries (and much later the Grants) online profile,
being granted a separate domain eventually as well as forming a significant proportion of the number of visits to
the UCL collections websites. This is not entirely surprising, the catalogue from its inception held data and
images for almost every object in the collection (Washington, 2012c, 5), making it one of the largest online
museum catalogues in the world (MacDonald, 2005, 11) and therefore could be used to provide an understanding
of the Petries collection otherwise impossible without visiting the museum in real life.
Both of the websites have shown increased popularity year on year, with more and more visits (page views) and
hits (accessing a file) with each year (as shown by server logs) and in Table 4. This can either be interpreted as
an increase in the number of people using the museum website because knowledge of its existence is spreading,
or as a shift in usage, whereby people who did just use the real world museum now also, or even exclusively, use
the virtual museum embodied by the online catalogue. If the former is true, then the total usage numbers of the
museum websites and catalogues will increase over time as more and more people start using the website,
independent of the users of the physical museum. If the latter is true, number of real world museum users is

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likely to stagnate or decrease in the future, as people increasingly use both or change their research practice
towards a remote, online paradigm rather than a physical, manually interactive one.
Table 4 shows a year on year increase for both the Grant and the Petrie websites, however, the Petrie was unique
in collecting visitor data for several years, with the Grant starting to do so in 2007. Since 2010, all Collections
websites and catalogues collect visitor data, but the most recent data is as yet unavailable for the Petrie and the
Grant (Challis, 2010, 6-7). If it can be shown that there has also been an increase in the number of real world
users, especially research users, over that same period of time, then conclusions may be drawn regarding the
relationship between the development of usage for the virtual museum and the real world museum. This requires
an establishment of the fact that all of the people using the museum in the real world are not the same people
using it on the internet (see below), as that would mean that the increase of one was directly caused by an
increase in the other, and that the same person was, in essence, being counted twice.

Table 4: individual page view requests for the Petrie and Grant museum websites, including the catalogues (Washington,

The nature of most web analytics software, including both Analog and Google Analytics, the suites which
collected and generated data for the Grant and the Petrie Websites, precludes the possibility of collecting
meaningful demographic data; the software logs hits, pages accessed, downloads and other basic site usage data,
but does not collect data on a persons age or occupation. The scope for applying a demographic filter to the
results gathered is rather narrow, and is limited to two basic criteria, the entry point to the website (the web
address from which the Petrie or Grant website was accessed) and search data, the general nature of user defined
searches within the online catalogues. Both of these sets of data can contribute towards a very general
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understanding of the online user demographic (neither the Petrie, nor the Grant use online demographic surveys
of their website users).

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The entry point data is limited to two periods, 2001-2003, and since the adoption of Google analytics (2007 for
the Grant and 2010 for the Petrie), this means that only a small amount of this data overlaps directly with the real
world demographic data. However, the Google analytics data provides an opportunity to understand the
relationship between the demographic of the online user against that of the real world user (more of hereafter).
As can be seen in Figure 1, a little over

of the usership of the UCL Museums and Collections are from

within the U.K., this is not particularly surprising as both of the museums are based in the U.K and are run by

Figure 1: A pie chart showing the percentages of each country that hosts domains from which the UCL Museums and Coll

Universities based in the U.K. The number of users from the U.K. in the period sampled (Jan 2008 Mar 2012)
is in the hundreds of thousands, which does not preclude the possibility that they are all UCL students, but does
make it statistically unlikely. The ties to U.K. are not just limited by increased awareness of the museums in their
home country, another factor is search engine mechanics; Google is by far and away the most popular search
engine (eBizMBA, 2012) in terms of number of users and it, like several other major search engines, such as
Bing and Yahoo!, arrange the search results according to a number of different factors apart from the actual
search term including any geographical data available (inferred primarily from the Internet Protocol (IP) address
of the accessing computer or device, which is country specific (IANA, 2012)), and local pages will often be
returned over pages from different countries (Deheeger, 2009, 9). This is partially to compensate for the
diversity and internationality of the internet, helping people searching the internet to find websites in a language
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they are likely to understand. But it also contributes towards delivering, in this case, U.K. sites predominantly to
U.K. users, even if sites from another country would be more relevant (and, in the age of online translators such
as Googles Translate and Yahoo!s BabelFish, often comprehensible). In the case of the UCL Museums and
Collection sites, the majority of U.K. hits are from London IP addresses (where both of the museums are based),
suggesting that a large number of the searches are not just products of search engine manipulation according to
geography, but that they are by people acquainted with the Museums or the University and are deliberately
seeking out their virtual presences on the internet.

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The significant proportion of users from the United States, and indeed the rest of the world (32.32% of the UCL
Museums and Collections website access is from outside of the U.K., amounting to over 128000 visits) however
allows a new inference to be made about the relationship between the Virtual and Real museums, as users in the
United States cannot be using the real world museum concurrently. Users of the UCL Museums and Collections
websites, and specifically the Petrie and Grant Museum online catalogues, in the U.S. are gathering information
from those museums entirely independently of the physical manifestation of the museum itself. This means that
very significant numbers of people are using the museum without having the ability to visit its real world site
and interact physically with the objects it contains. In this way, increased overseas research at UCL research
museums should have no perceptible impact on the popularity or utility of the museum in the real world, as those
users couldnt use the real world museum. In the UK that distinction cannot be made.
Another potential avenue into the demographics of those interacting with the museums virtual self arrives via
the medium of social networking, a rapidly growing and mutable channel for expression and exploration online.
UCL
Museums
and
Collections
has a page
on the social
networking
site
Facebook, a
social
networking site with a membership of over 845 million people from all over the world (Facebook, 2012, 4).
The Facebook Insights engine allows limited demographic statistics collection for the pages, in this case, data is
available and was provided for the nationality, city, language and age group of all the people who has clicked the
like button on the UCL Museums and Collections Facebook page (appendix 1). This limited but still
worthwhile tool means that a new facet of the body of UCL Museums online users can be mapped out, though
of course it should be noted that you dont need to be using any other aspect of the museum, real or virtual at any
point to like the page. There are therefore no guarantees that any of the people which have created data for the
Facebook Insights engine are connected in any other way to the either of the museums being examined here, or
indeed any other museum. However, a recent study (Lifshits, 2011) has demonstrated that people using
Facebook are increasingly inclined to see the like as a badge of social status or a statement of intent, if this is
the case, it is logical to assume that the majority of those people who like the UCL Museums and Collections
Figure
Pie charts
showing
the gender
andLondon
age distribution
members
24 2:Tobias
Bowman
| University
College
Institute of Archaeology
across Facebook (Burbary, 2011).

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page do actually like it personally. The same study (Lifshits, 2011) also demonstrates that, multiplying the
number of likes over a set period by 100 gives an approximation of the number of page views for that same
period of time. This suggests that the UCL museums and Collections page is popular (following the studys
model (Lifshits, 2011) in the year between January 2011 and 2012, 119400 people may have looked at the UCL
Museums and collections page, which is a great deal of people in addition to (though probably partially
overlapping with) the users of the museums websites and online catalogues).
The available demographic data for likes then may at least partially represent a demographic profile of those that
would associate with the UCL museums and interact with their virtual and/or physical presences. Around two
thirds of the people that liked the UCL Museums and Collections page were Female and aged between 25 and
34 years old. Unfortunately neither the Grant nor the Petrie collected data on the gender ratios of users in the
physical museums, preventing quantitative comparisons between the virtual and real world uses by people of
different genders. However a recent study (Burbary, 2011, 4; Fig 2) shows that more than half of Facebooks
users worldwide are male. This discrepancy cannot be explained here due to a lack of corroborating data, but
should be explored in subsequent study. The ages of the individuals that like the UCL Museums and
Collections page are confined predominantly for both men and women to the 18-44 age range. This is partially
down to the general demographics of Facebooks membership as a whole, with the greatest proportion of
Facebook users being 25-34 years old. It is also potentially an indicator that many people that like the UCL
Museums and Collections page are in Higher Education, and may therefore be in a position to be using the Grant
and/or the Petrie for the purposes of research, as the majority of students in higher education are within the
predominant age groups of the Facebook membership. The spatial demographics appear to generally follow that

Table 5: Basic usage data for the Petries V2 catalogue between 2003 and 2011(Washington, 2012d). The catalogue was

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for the websites, with the overwhelming majority coming from the UK and London, with the next greatest
proportion being from the US, Egypt also features prominently, possibly due the Petries status as one of the
largest collections of Egyptian archaeological material in the world.
In order to understand the relationship between the use of the Virtual Museum and that of the real, the nature of
the real world usage of both the Grant and the Petrie needs to be understood, and then put up against the usage
data for the online profile. It has already been established that the online access to the Museums has developed
and grown with the museums websites and catalogues growing both in sophistication and in popularity. What of
the real world museums, has the way that people, especially researchers, use the museums changed in any
perceptible way since the virtual side of the museum was created? The online catalogue search data from the
Petrie catalogue is the only data set available for study at time of printing, however there is promise of other
catalogues (including the Grant) being made available in the future, facilitating further research. The data was
extracted from the server logs of the Petrie by a piece of software developed in the python programming
language specifically for this dissertation. The resulting data provides several useful pieces of information, from
which limited inferences about the nature of visits to the Petrie online catalogue can be made. Since the second
version of the catalogue was launched in 2003 and decommissioned in 2011, the usage of the catalogue had
increased dramatically: in 2003, 325 object records were called up on the catalogue, by 2005, it was 551162
(Table 5, Washington, 2012d). This high number of object lookups is caused by a similarly high number of
searches, which came in two types, firstly drills, whereby searchers clicked on specific search phrases suggested
by the catalogue until they reached the objects which matched the discovered term for what was being sought.
Most drills brought up the wanted objects by providing the object name as a search category. This implies that
the majority of people searching the database by drills knew exactly what they were looking for, which possibly
implies a research background. Similarly, those which employed the other kind of search; textual input for one of
6 criteria (Table 6; Washington, 2012d) was predominantly either for the object name, or, far more interestingly,
the accession number (the unique number attributed to an artefact within the physical museums collection
(Washington, 2012d, 1)). What the accession number search crucially shows is that the majority of text based
searches in the database (referred to as Textuals in tables 5 and 6) were using as their search start point the
number of the artefact from the real world museum, which would, of course take them straight to its virtual
counterpart. This means that people had to be using the real world museum, and then visiting the online
catalogue to further their research, implying that, in these cases, the presence of the online catalogue had
supported real world research, rather than supplanted it. This may imply that the hypothesis proposed in chapter
3 is not a representation of the truth. Analysis of the real world visitor data for the museums in the next section
provides further insight.
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THE REAL WORLD

Table 6: Queries on the Petrie online catalogue by field and type. The number of text based searches is higher than in tab

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Visits to the Grant Museum of Zoology

40000
35000
30000
25000
20000
Number of Visitors

15000
10000
5000
0

Year

Data
concerning visitor figures is less abundant than that available for the websites, but there is year on year data
going back to 2003 for the Grant and for 2007-10 for the Petrie (some data was lost). The data was gathered for
the purposes of yearly overviews of the development of the real world museum in lieu of securing funding for
the years ahead, as well as justifying that already received. The data for the Grant shows that there was a
generally increasing trend in visitor numbers from 2003 to 2011 with a dip in the 2010-11 segment due to an 8
month closure for renovation. This increase correlates with the increase in online usage (both in the Petrie and
Grant, as well as the other UCL Museums and Collections catalogues (Challis, 2012, 9)), and is similarly
dramatic in its sudden growth. But the total number of users of the website is far higher than the real world
museum. This is partially because the virtual museum is more easily accessed, but also suggests (along with the
Petries catalogue search data, specifically the accession number searches) that the people using the real world
museum may also using the website, in addition to those for whom using the real museum is a difficulty. If, like
the Petrie, much of the usage of the Grant online catalogue is research oriented, then it could be argued that the
increase in popularity of the real world museum is disproportionately small compared to that of the virtual
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museum, hinting at a potential future schism, whereby the virtual museums popularity will begin to degrade the
real museums utility, eventually leading to a steady fall in visitor numbers.

Total research users of the Grant Museum of Zoology

180
160
140
120
100
Number of Visitors

80
60
40
20
0

Year

As yet however, this has not happened. The evidence seems to suggest that, for the moment, the development of
the Grants virtual space is actually enhancing the position and utility of the museum in the real world; more
people are using it year on year, and more of those people are researchers (Challis, 2012, 9). This would go some
way towards disproving the hypothesis proposed in chapter 3. The data from the Petrie is more scarce, due to a
data loss between the years 2005 and 2009. However, some useful comparisons can be drawn between the
profile for the Grant and that for the Petrie. The Petrie drew around the same number of visitors in 2007-8 and
2009-10, with a slight peak in 2008-9, possibly due to the popularity of the Excavating Egypt touring
exhibition of Petrie artefacts (Figure 5). The general stability of the visitor numbers despite increasing and
significant numbers of users of the online catalogue (see Table 4), suggests that the visitors to the Petrie are not
being dissuaded by the facility of using the online database, and that the growth in the number of people using
the virtual museum is not leading to a decline in the popularity of the real one, disproving the hypothesis. An
alternate explanation would be that the visitor number had been climbing steadily until 2009, whereupon they
began to fall off as researchers began to stop visiting the physical collections and started using the online
collections. This would corroborate the hypothesis. In general, real world visitor data for both museums suggests
that the rapid growth and development of their online services has not had such a dramatically detrimental effect
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upon visitor numbers as originally thought; if indeed the Petries visitor numbers reflect a steady homeostasis
then the effect of the online aspect seems minimal, if it is, in fact, a downward trend, it is not a severe one, and
the impact of the growing online usership is relatively minor.

Overall visitor numbers for the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology

16000
15500
15000
14500
Number of Visitors

14000
13500
13000
12500
2007-8

2008-9

2009-10

Year

CHAPTER 5: EVALUATION
OF MICE AND MEN
A problem with this study is the dependence on data from the museums themselves, which must be available in
sufficient quantities and covering a sufficient number of factors, in order to be useful. It must also represent a
sufficient duration of time to make trends become apparent. As was stated above (Chapter 1) the management of
the museums as (in essence) faculties of UCL implied that there would be standardised data collection, as there
is for each university department, this statement is false. Data concerning the ranges and factors which were to
be studied was available, but in differing quantities and qualities (i.e. some data sets had points for shorter time
intervals or collected data to more precise degrees (rounding web hits to tens rather than thousands etcetera). The
online data for the Grant museum has been provided using the Google Analytics engine which provides a wide
range of different data for the past several years. The Petrie has only been using the Analytics engine for one
year, and previously used the Analog engine to generate web stats, meaning that different kinds of data were
available for each museum. This has meant that some areas of interest and significance have been deliberately
underexploited in this research in order to minimise the risk of bias arising from using only one source of data,
for example the kinds of file types accessed on the websites. The Analog web analysis software provides a list of
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the most commonly downloaded file types from the Petrie website from 2003-2007, it shows that more than 75%
of all file types downloaded are image files (predominantly .jpg, .gif and .bmp formats). The relevance of this is
potentially great, as it could enable a comparison of the number of images downloaded against the number of
catalogue searches and/or museum visits. The lack of equivalent data from the Grant prevented detailed
examination, though it is briefly touched upon at the beginning of chapter 4. Museums would gain much more
useful insights from this kind of research is they were more consistent in their data collection, a standardised set
of collection parameters for UK museums would mean that data from any museum in the country could be
compared with another. Therefore studies of this type in the future would have findings more universally
applicable and more reliable than at the moment, because each museum collects different kinds of data in
different ways, and then treats that data differently, there is no consistency.
The data is provided by individuals, with their own work ethics, attitudes to research and personal motivations,
any one of which could affect the data provided or the nature of the data itself and therefore it is necessary to
factor in human agency as a potential source of bias. However, the fact that the data for both museums seem
generally to follow the same pattern may mean that this isnt the case, further study covering more institutions is
needed to be certain.
The irregularity of available data was a source of difficulty during this research, and has led to several inferences
which are substantiated by relatively small or short-lived trend changes, such as the Petries visitor numbers
which were only available for the years 2007-10. This has meant that a potentially crucial inference, as to
whether the rise in visitor numbers in 2009 was an anomaly or part of a continuous trend, has been left unmade.
This lack of data is due to its being lost after collection. The visitor numbers for the Petrie have been collected
for far longer than the time-span made available for this research, but the employees of the museum (up to and
including the director) were unable to locate any data before 2007. The fact that the data was once collected, and
merely lost, suggests that it may be found again, opening the door to further research. Similarly, research in the
same area which chooses to look at other museums may find that their data is more intact.
There are many factors which can affect both the number of real world visitors and the number of virtual
world visitors. Only a few of these have been recorded by the museums, this means that there are potential skews
in the data provided (both peaks and troughs) which cannot be explained, but are most likely the result of one of
the following factors: Closure of a museum or website for upgrades, advertisement campaigns, seasonal and
touring exhibitions, changes to the national schools curriculum, and variations of the ranking of the museums
websites in internet search engines such as Google.
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Another problem arises when considering some of the web data for the museums. In places, where data has been
available for one museums website only, there has been contemporary data available for the UCL Museums and
Collections website cluster, encompassing the Petrie and Grant Museum portals, as well as those for every other
museum run by UCL. This is clearly not an ideal situation, as it forces the assumption that the online usage
trends of the UCL museums (which are all research museums) are broadly the same. It is true that the Petrie and
Grant websites are among the largest of the group, so their influence is greater than many others, but it still
leaves a substantial margin for error should the way that people use one or both of the websites studied differ
significantly from the norm.
Another potential source of error comes with understanding that the usership of the websites of both the Grant
and the Petrie could be comprised of different people to those that use the museum in real life. A limited group of
users likely to use both the museum and the website was defined in chapter 4 as those which searched the online
catalogue by accession number, the unique catalogue I.D. attached to every artefact held in the real world
museums collection. However, even that is not conclusive proof of parallel use of both services. It is however
reasonable to assume that many of those using the museums websites (shown in chapter 4 to be predominantly
for research purposes) were conducting research on objects held by the museum and are therefore more likely to
be using the real world museum than an individual who has never used the website. This is because users of
the museum are more likely to be aware of the websites existence, and more likely need its services. As a direct
result of this study however, both the Grant and the Petrie have changed some of their data collecting strategies
and techniques in order to better answer questions like these in the future.
As a result of these drawbacks, there are more sources of error than would normally be acceptable in a regular
scientific study, however, this could be expected considering the unusual nature of the research. In the U.K. a
study of this type has not been carried out and published independently of a museum body or governmental
organisation. The variety and nature of the data required by such a study was hard to come by. Future studies
examining this issue will hopefully increase the awareness of the importance of this data to museums, and
change the way they collect and store this information to allow greater access and greater comparison with other
institutions.
There have however been some important discoveries realised in this project. It appears that, certainly in the
Grant, and probably in the Petrie, that the growth and development of web based services has not had the
detrimental effect upon the real world museum proposed in the hypothesis. The development of wide reaching,
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useful internet services appears to be facilitating museum based research, rather than replacing it. Despite the
limited data available, conclusions can be drawn from the work done. As well as synthesising web-oriented
research at a time where social networking and online identity are increasingly definitive of a persons online
and real world behaviour, this research has shaped the understanding of online usage of many services and has
facilitated the integration of social networking statistics with data both from the museums and their websites.
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
The potential for future research is great. The internet as an educational and social tool is developing rapidly, and
museums will increasingly need to interact with the internet in order to survive and flourish. This study
examined a small and limited sample, two research museums. At first glance a more logical research question
may have studied one research museum and one tourist museum, however, this was prevented by two
principle factors: i) the belief that two UCL run museums would provide more reliable and comparable sets of
data than two completely unrelated museums, and ii) the understanding that studying one museum of each type
would change the balance of the study, with two separate sample universes with a sample size of one museum of
each type. This would have drastically increased the risks of bias being introduced by the data from either
museum. With this study, limited to two museums by its size, it was necessary to choose two which had been
exposed to roughly the same set of conditions, and it appears that, this was the case for the Petrie and the Grant.
Future research should examine several research and tourist museums. In order to do this, museums with
significant and similar statistical records (i.e. the same kinds of data) would be ideal, and the study would
resultantly be much larger. In addition, research using sample data from websites which has been collected
consistently for long periods of time would provide new perspectives on the topic, as well as opening further
avenues of research. This research is increasingly likely to become a requirement, as the gap between the virtual
and physical world shrinks with and the relevance of understanding the internets effect on both organisations
and individuals increases.

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSIONS
FALL OUT
Despite the setbacks and difficulties encountered in the course of this research, several important points have
emerged. The first of these regards the hypothesis, which appears to be incorrect; in the cases of both the Grant
and the Petrie, visitor numbers have either increased or, at the very least, been left unaffected by the rapid and
substantial growth of their online catalogues and websites. Why is this the case?
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Firstly, the change in use patterns (more online access means less real world use) could be happening more
slowly than predicted, and a visible downward trend will take many more years to become apparent, however
there is at present no proof of that being the case.
The second explanation is that researchers gain more information by working with the real objects, and are using
the online catalogues and websites to help refine their searches and datasets before going to the museum to carry
out their research. The museum is facilitating the research being carried out in the real world, but the quality of
the databases is not yet sufficient to allow it to supplant real world research.
The third possible explanation is more subjective. Any physical space has a perceptual and subjective aspect
with which people interact in different ways. There is a quality to the physical and the real which, at present,
cannot be imitated in the virtual world, virtual reality is still very much virtual. Therefore it is possible that
people are continuing to visit research museums not because it is necessary to facilitate their research, but
because they feel that they can interact with the objects and the space more fully by being there (Schweibenz,
1998, 190; Klahr et. al, 2006, 199). Looking at images provides a different and diminished sensory impact than
interacting with a real artefact. The value of physicality is hard to measure or define, but it may be a crucial
factor in explaining why researchers and tourists alike continue to visit museums such as the Grant and the Petrie
(Dillenburg, 2011, 12-13), even though their entire contents are available in a digital medium.
In conclusion that the nature of the online population interacting with the Petrie and Grant in the virtual world is
in a state of flux. New people are using the services every day, and in different ways, with expansions into
Facebook, the new catalogues and websites, as well as online services offered inside the museums, such as the
QRator service in the Grant where object labels can be scanned with Smartphones and the user will be taken to
the corresponding online catalogue entry, as well as being able to rate different artefacts (suggesting a future
practice of mass collaborative research). The Digital Egypt For Universities programme run by the Petrie, first
created in 2000, is still run and can be accessed from the current website, it features classes and information
packs which use objects from the Petrie collections. Both of the museums will have to develop the online
facilities they offer and increase the size and utility of the virtual museum in order to remain relevant in a world
increasingly dominated by internet based data supply, research and discussion. Improved real-world access to the
collections will also be required to stay relevant in a world where total immersion in data is rapidly becoming the
norm.

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The research question in chapter two asks how the development of the museums online services affects their
utility in the real world. It appears that the relationship is mutualistic. The websites are popular and growing
because they encompass the essence (academically, not phenomenologically) of the real world museum, and they
increase the usefulness of the museums by increasing levels of access to the collections to members of the
public. However, this relationship may be damaging in the future, as the steadily increasing numbers of web
users are far outstripping the increases in real world users. Eventually the online presence of the Museum may
overshadow the real museum, and lead to a fall in real world visitors whilst the museum supports the websites
existence and popularity (the catalogue serves little purpose without real artefacts to reference). That relationship
is not mutualistic, but parasitic, and may develop over coming years. Research museums will need to increase
the integration of the virtual with the real in order to remain viable, convincing people that they need to
experience the museum in real life in order to benefit the most from what it has to offer: i.e. its collections and
staff. Increasing public access to artefacts in storage or on display infrequently could be a first step towards
increasing the awareness of researchers that the museum is where the core research of many archaeological,
anthropological, ethnographic or historical projects should be based.
The museums sector in general, and research museums in particular, need to take heed of research like this, as it
demonstrates the need for museums to grow. First impressions would suggest that research museums value to
people as a physical space and the depth of knowledge that can be imparted by interacting with objects in real
life, means that the existence of the real world museum alone will be enough to keep people coming in, but this
is a false hope. The development of online services, computer technology and computer literacy in the general
population will mean that the internet will change and grow rapidly over the coming years, and it could be
catastrophic to think that the real world will not change along with it, research museums will have to increase
their relevance and usefulness if they want to maintain a viable existence in the real world short of becoming
support structures for online presences, warehouses or places where things are kept for posterity.

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APPENDIX 1

Appendix 1, Object 1: A screenshot of the Insights Engine results page for the like demographics of the UCL Museums a

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APPENDIX 1

Appendix 1: Object 2. A table showing the chronologies of the online websites used by museums run
by UCL museums and collections (washington, 2012a)

APPENDIX 2

University College London Institute of Archaeology | Tobias Bowman

APPENDIX 2: OBJECT 1: a screenshot of a sample email sent out to many diff erent individuals
though to possess data relevant to this research, each email was almost identical, with slight
changes depending on the nature of the individuals post and place of employment, as well as
the kind of data being sought.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ashby, J. (j.ashby@ucl.ac.uk). 2012. Re: Electronic Resources Study, Email to Tobias Bowman
(ycrnf06@ucl.ac.uk). Sent Mon 6 Feb 2012. [Accessed 22 March 2012].
Bayne, S., Ross, J., and Williamson, Z., Objects, subjects, bits and bytes: learning from the digital collections of
the National Museums, Museum and Society, Vol. 7, No. 2.
British Museum, 2011, The British Museum : report and accounts for the year ended 31 march 2011, British
Museum, London.
Burbary, K., 2011, Facebook Demographics Revisited 2011 statistics, Web Business by Ken Burbary. Weblog
7th March 2011, retrieved on 15th of March 2012 from World Wide Web:
http://www.kenburbary.com/2011/03/facebook-demographics-revisited-2011-statistics-2/
Cain, J., 2012, History of the Grant Museum, 1827-present, retrieved on 28th of February 2012 from World Wide
Web: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/silva/museums/zoology/collections/history
Challis, D., 2011, UCL Museums and Collections Annual Report 2009-10, UCL Museums and Collections.
London.
Deheeger, J., 2009, How to make a nationality neutral search, unpublished response from a Google Engineer to
a Google Product Forum enquiry, retrieved on 14th of March 2012 from World Wide Web:
http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/websearch/finding-stuff-ongoogle/lwjOSHSS_FE
Dillenburg, E., 2011, What, if Anything, Is a Museum?, Exhibitionist, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp 8-13.
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Tobias Bowman | University College London Institute of Archaeology