The quality of Hungarian cultural sites: the ten quality principles defined within the Minerva Project

Abstract

In our days, when nearly every cultural institution has a website, it is time to focus on quality. Quality does not only depend on technology, it is equally connected with well organized content, continuous maintenance and the monitoring of user needs. The EU-funded Minerva project defines ten quality principles for cultural sites. Sites should be transparent, effective, maintained, accessible, user-centered, responsive, multi-lingual, interoperable, managed and preserved. In March 2005, a quality test was carried out among six Hungarian cultural sites at the request of the Minerva working group on the quality of websites. All the examined websites have proved highly accessible and effective. However, the general challenges for the tested sites were the following: 1. Mission statement missing, or not on the front page 2. Crumbtrail, or sitemap missing 3. Multilingual equals with bilingual 3. Users are not involved by the planning 4. User-forums are missing 5. Problems with using metadata standards and OAI-PMH protocols 6. Media migration plan and disaster recovery plan are missing.