Does Accreditation of Museum Contribute to Attracting More Visitors? : Focusing on Accreditation of National and Public Museum

Museums play an important role in the development of cultural and artistic disciplines and contribute to the cultural enjoyment of the general public. As such, museum visitors are important for brand building and marketing, expanding cultural enjoyment, public contribution, and active communication. Korean museums have been focusing on improving the quality experience by holding interesting exhibitions and programs and acquiring new collections. To ensure the quality control and operational efficiency of museum exhibitions, Korea has legally required public museums to participate in evaluation and certification since 2017 and national museums since 2020. If museum accreditation is considered as a signal that a museum will provide a desirable experience, it might be able to secure visitors by responding to it. This raises the question of whether efforts to improve museum quality, as represented by accreditation, lead to increased museum attendance. To examine the impact of accreditation on the number of visitors to national and public museums, the study conducted a double difference analysis and a panel analysis between the years 2013-2021. The study found that the Difference in Difference analysis did not show a significant difference in the number of visitors to museums before and after accreditation, but the fixed effect analysis showed that the number of visitors to public museums increased significantly in the year of accreditation and then decreased significantly in the following year. The study result suggests that accreditation had a temporary signaling effect, but it did not fundamentally change attendance. There is a need for increased publicity about certification and measurement of the effectiveness of certification in attracting visitors, as well as increased incentives for museums to participate in certification.