To reply to Lar, in my UK experience big national museums with well-staffed web departments are very interested in and conscious of their web traffic, and the web departments use the figures in their reports to management, to justify their existence and budgets among other things. Of course these are the ones with big numbers to point at. As soon as you move to smaller museums, staff levels and interest decline very rapidly (as do web traffic figures), and some museums have very few staff & little general awareness.

On the related matter of the Ball case study, I agree with Smallbones that this is not an approach to recommend, although 47 links is a tolerable number. I don't think it says how many are still there, which would be interesting. We have had bad experiences in the past with the European Library, which some will remember, and various others adding links to little archival deposits only likely to interest authors of a full-length book biography. Generally COI people should not add links themselves, as per the policy. I have advocated here the "supervised linking" approach which has worked well with the Victoria & Albert Museum (actual articles, and also links to museum web pages) and now the Metropolitan Museum of Art (links to full PDFs of their huge catalogues - I am trying to get some figures out of them for a small case study). The GLAM person suggests links on a special user sub-page, and one or more independent volunteer scrutinizes them & comments, before the GLAM person adds them. This is a very efficient approach making little demand on volunteer time, and giving an "audit trail" for the GLAM confirming they took appropriate precautions before adding the link.

The MMA additions in particular are a fabulous resource, & the V&A ones have in the great majority of cases stood the test of time, as they were added about 5 years ago. To see the process, look at: *V&A: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:VAwebteam/Sandbox *MMA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WilliamDigiCol/Archive

John