Heritage institutions house cultural and research content, which is the key source to stimulate soft innovation. Despite the potential, heritage collections are mostly inaccessible via digital mediums. We analyse the macro, meso and micro conditions of heritage organizations across Europe to identify the key determinants that foster soft innovation as reflected by the share of collection digitization and online publication. We find that organizations respond positively to an environment of high consumer digital literacy and sustainable resource allocation that enables slack, skilled staff and long-term strategic planning. Innovation is thus, in fact, enhanced by digital literacy from both producers and consumers.
Heritage tourism is one of the oldest forms of travel for leisure, and more recently an important resource for the tourism industry. Museums benefit from ticket sales but also from recognition. Digital technology has served as an important tool to innovate in all areas of the museum institution, repositioning firms within the heritage tourism market, leading to emerging forms of consumption. Museums may not be fully ready to accept the visit of a digital heritage tourist, yet acknowledging the value of the new consumer can free museums from the limits of their physical walls to explore new horizons in the digital information market space. We define the digital heritage tourist and argue that the large banks of objects and knowledge about our past held in museums are an extraordinary source of discovery, leisure and lifelong learning for the emerging digital heritage tourist.
Visits to museums have been studied as hedonic and utilitarian forms of cultural consumption, though limited attention has been given to the access of museum collections online. We perform a unique historic analysis of the visibility of collections in a museum of ethnographic collections and compare 100 years of onsite visits to 5 years online visits. We find two main results: first, access to collections increased substantially online. From a selection of objects available both onsite and online, access grew from an average of 156,000 onsite visits per year to over 1.5 million views online per year. Onsite, the museum received 15.5 million visits in a span of a century while online, collections were viewed 7.9 million times in only the last 5 years. Second, we find a difference in consumer preference for type of object, favouring 3D onsite and 2D online (photographs of objects, particularly when showing them being used). Results support understanding of online heritage consumption and emerging dynamics, particularly outside of an institutional environment, such as Wikipedia.
One of the available and yet controversial tools in cultural policy at the national level is the reduction of VAT rates for cultural goods and services. We document the standard and reduced VAT rates in EU-28 countries in the period from 1993 to 2013 and explore the underlying determinants. We further introduce a simple theoretical framework to explain how reduced fiscal rates are expected to decrease prices and increase quantities of the consumed cultural goods and services. We then estimate quantitatively that a decrease in the VAT rate for books by one percentage point is associated with an economically significant drop in the price by 2.6%. Finally, we show the positive effect of a fiscal rate reduction on the book expenditure, where a one percentage point decrease in the VAT rate for books leads to an increase in expenditure by 2.7%.
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