# Virtual Reality in Museums: Exploring the Experiences of Museum Professionals
## 4 Departments/Teams Handling VR in Museums and Digital Strategies
### Digital Strategies  
Most participating museums have an overall digital strategy (10 out of 16), either in the form of a roadmap or in the form of particular goals for introducing emerging technologies. Despite the existence of such strategies, they are usually quite broad and cover many aspects of digital experiences, from social media, to virtual to VR, and usually do not include specific guidelines on VR. As interviewee 16 mentions: \"At the moment, we have an organizational digital strategy, but that touches everything. That includes from the website and our online ticketing and our online shop all the way to immersive or non-immersive digital experiences in the galleries\".  
Nevertheless, it appears that the existence of a digital strategy, even a more general one, is one of the factors facilitating VR's permanent inclusion in the museum. Quite interestingly, in most cases the museums that had a permanent VR installation also had a digital strategy in place, while the museums that did not have such a strategy only used VR technology sporadically in the context of temporary exhibitions.  
What was evident in the conducted interviews is that four museums are uncertain regarding the possibilities that emerging technologies can offer, which may partly explain the fact that such technologies are still not included in a wider policy or strategy, with most museums still being at the phase of trial-and-error in an attempt to discover if these technologies actually serve their needs:  
_\"We do not have a written down strategy regarding emerging technologies. Basically, we just want to deliver content in the most effective way possible. If it turns out that it's an emerging technology that we think would provide the best experience or the most effective way to deliver content for visitors, then we would go with that\"_. (Interviewee 14)  
Finally, in two cases the introduction of VR is connected to branding issues and is used as a marketing tool to promote the museum as a space of \"immersive experiences\" (Interviewee 5). This is illustrative of an often-encountered connection between the use of technology and the overall marketing and promotion of the museum [28].  
Another important aspect of a digital strategy is whether or not evaluation of new technologies is required. Out of 15 museums, only 3 cases did not have any type of evaluation procedure in place, while in one case the evaluation is currently limited, since they are \"working on creating more robust measurements\" (interviewee 13). The evaluation procedures mentioned by most participants include observation, visitor interviews, questionnaires, and user testing combined with visitor feedback. In many cases these tools are used in conjunction with other data collected in the museum space or online (such as visitor statistics on attendance, earned income, usage data, visitors' most favored aspect of an exhibition, or the number of downloads of related material). However, despite the attempts of many museums to incorporate rigorous evaluation procedures, this proves challenging due to the different evaluation needs associated with different types of technology and the lack of funds to carry out such procedures. The challenge also lies in the fact that an evaluation should not only measure the effectiveness of an individual technology but rather the \"experience as a whole\" and how this experience is affected (Interviewee 1), which is often neglected by many evaluation studies. The challenges relating to evaluation procedures have also been acknowledged in relevant literature, which emphasizes that the impact of such technologies is difficult to measure in the absence of specific objectives set out in digital strategies [31].