摘要：The aim of the paper is to investigate museum communication and establish to what extent museums are responding to the changing social context of the early 21st century. Museums have been traditionally perceived as authoritative and distant repositories of knowledge. Over the last few decades there has been a drive to make museum visits meaningful experiences for all peoples of different origins and backgrounds, including the development of websites, not only as a marketing strategy, but also as an important channel of knowledge dissemination. The data has been collected from the websites of four of the most important art galleries in Europe. Using a Critical Discourse Analysis approach and drawing on Blunden’s work on museum communication (2017a, 2017b), the analysis will focus firstly on the webpages where the museum presents itself to the public and explains its principles, beliefs and objectives. It will then analyse what kind of information about the artefacts in the museums is given and especially how it is conveyed to the visitor. The findings reveal the different approaches adopted by the museums.
关键词：museums;ideology;accessibility;visitors;museum communication
