A Methodology for Evaluating Archaeological Web Sites

Even if nowadays almost every cultural Institution, including archaeological museums and sites, owns an institutional web site, there are few investigations on evaluation criteria. MILE, a methodology for web sites evaluation, was recently specialized for cultural web sites by a team of experts from Politecnico di Milano, original developers of the general methodology, and from cultural institutions, coordinated by IBC. It precisely defines scenarios, i.e. abstract tasks performed by abstract users: evaluators assign marks to specific attributes, as clarity or accessibility, acting as the supposed user. Thus evaluation may take into account the target user population and the intended web site goals. A group of students in Architecture from the Université di Firenze was selected to perform an extensive application of this methodology to a large sample of web sites of archaeological institutions, including practically all such Italian sites, a number of Spanish and Polish ones and a sample of sites from other European and extra-European countries. The results give an insight into the effectiveness of such Internet presentations and test the validity of the methodology, suggesting an extensive application of it and the adoption of widely accepted and objective guidelines for multimedia cultural communication.