Additional descriptions provided with Twitter and blog for exhibited items in an anthropological and prehistoric archaeological exhibition in a museum

Abstract

Existing web services provide less-expensive and less-skill-intensive ways of preparing descriptions for museum exhibit items. Here, we report a Twitter and blog based system to present additional information on the exhibition entitled “Curatorial Graffiti” held at the University Museum, the University of Tokyo from 2009 to 2013. Comparison of two systems that we employed and analysis of questionnaires between 2011 September and 2013 May revealed the following: (1) Simple and light contents are better than rich ones in terms of accessibility and ease of display when visitor-owned mobile phones were used via mobile phone networks; (2) Proportions of users of the web system were the highest in younger generations (10s, 17%; 20s, 24%) and the lowest in the oldest generations (>60s, <7%); (3) Potential demands of visitors were high, but their expectations were diverse.