Preferences for a Multimedia Web Platform to Increase Awareness of Cultural Heritage: A Stated Choice Experiment

As stated by UNESCO, cultural heritage (CH) (tangible and intangible) plays an important role in inheriting, maintaining and passing the values and knowledge from past generations to the next ones. To create an interest and raise the awareness of CH, variety of media sources (i.e., maps, text, 3D models, virtual reality) are exploited. These multimedia sources are brought together on web platforms that preserve and disseminate tangible and intangible CH information, with the aim to reach to large audiences. Although there are many examples of these multimedia web platforms, there is little research on understanding people’s willingness to use such multimedia web platforms and which media type people prefer for understanding and learning about CH. This is important to address since the success and sustainability of such platforms lies on their acceptance by the target audience in terms of data representation and the ease of information provision. To address this problem, this research applied a stated choice experiment to represent a hypothetical multimedia web platform to respondents. Different media types were tested for the description of CH (spatial content and historical content). The collected data from 630 respondents was analysed by a mixed logit model in order to determine the preference towards different media in a given hypothetical multimedia web platform to increase awareness of CH. The results indicate that people prefer multiple media rather than a single medium. Especially, adding dynamic media (i.e., 3D models and videos) to static media (i.e., 2D map and text) increase people’s willingness to use the multimedia web platform. The results help to formulate a new multimedia web platform and can help representatives of heritage sites to create a more sustainable way to broadcast information about CH to the public.