N. Di Blas1, F. Garzotto1, M. Guermandi2, F. Niccolucci3, P. Paolini1
1 Politecnico di Milano, Italy
2 IBC Emilia-Romagna, Italy
3 PIN, Università di Firenze, Italy

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 specialists from Politecnico di Milano, who originally developed 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 graduate students from Università 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 substantial majority of Spanish and Polish sites and a representative sample of English ones as well. The results, accessible on the web, give an insight into the effectiveness of Internet presentation and test the validity of the methodology, suggesting a wider application of it and the adoption of generally accepted and objective guidelines for cultural communication on the Internet.
Key words: museum, internet