Back to the Future. The effect of digital technology on the performance of public historical archives

The diffusion of social media platforms in public services calls for investigating their role in terms of supply and consumption. In cultural heritage, the application of such technologies has manifold implications ranging from preservation, to production and usage of cultural goods. This paper explores the scope for the use of new media in cultural heritage using website services. More specifically, we investigate the efficiency of public historical archives (PHAs) in Italy over the period 2009-2014 and try to assess the influence of websites on their efficiency. We use a two-stage approach involving the estimation of the frontier using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Window DEA (WDEA) to obtain PHAs efficiency scores and evaluate the effect of the use of websites on efficiency.

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