A Review of the Role of Social Media for the Cultural Heritage Sustainability

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks to the authors for their review of the role of social media for the cultural heritage sustainability. The following comments need to be addressed:

• Present few main conclusions in the Abstract.
• It would be better to present Figure 1 as a Table.
• How did you identify usage frequency of each social media tool? Please explain and provide the references.
• Why do you think the social media tools are generally applied to museums instead of urban heritage, buildings (monuments), and landscapes? Please provide some input or suggestions for improvement.
• How the popularity of the social media is ranked in the referenced studies? Is this based on survey? Please explain.

Author Response

Point 1: Present few main conclusions in the Abstract.

Response 1: We modified the last sentence of the abstract with a brief conclusion, as following: The article concludes that social media offers a platform for a wider range of stakeholders to have a voice in the decision process of cultural heritage management, and it should be widely applied to encourage citizens from all over the world.

Point 2: It would be better to present Figure 1 as a Table.

Response 2: We changed the Figure 1 as Table 4.

Point 3: How did you identify usage frequency of each social media tool? Please explain and provide the references.

Response 3: We marked all the social medias that mentioned in the selected articles and sum the amount (weight =1). Even if there are several different kinds of Apps  mentioned in the same article, we just consider it as 1 point. For example, in the case of Thessaloniki, a series of APPs, such as, Collective City Memory App, i-Guide App, and website at http://thesswiki.com/ are used to equip Thessaloniki as a Digital City. We marked App (1 point) and Web (1 point) in the first row of Table 4.

Point 4: Why do you think the social media tools are generally applied to museums instead of urban heritage, buildings (monuments), and landscapes? Please provide some input or suggestions for improvement.

Response 4: We suggest that museums are seen as core facilitators of cultural heritage for the general public. As museums usually play a role in daily life as the carriers of the exhibition, cultural events, archive, collection of cultural relics, etc. Such activities are often associated with budgets for public engagement, which allows social media tools to be developed and promoted.  

Whereas at a wider scale, citizens are not always aware that historic building, city, or landscape that they use or live within should be part of the need-to-be-conserved heritage.  This is often due to a lack of engagement at a city or landscape scale.  Therefore it is important that local governments, planners, developers raise the awareness of this issue with the general public, so that there is a good understanding of the broader definition of cultural heritage and it importance. This requires the need for citizen participation in planning and development process of both urban and rural landscapes. This requires investment and capacity-building type activities that equip citizen with knowledge and skills to offer helpful feedback, suggestions and practices. Social media tools provide an idea platform for this approach.

Point 5: How the popularity of the social media is ranked in the referenced studies? Is this based on survey? Please explain.

Response 5: We ranked the social media, according to the usage frequency of each social media platform.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper aimed to offer a comprehensive global review of the availability and functionalities of social media and to identify tools and platforms that applied currently to the current cultural heritage management process. 

As stated by the authors, social media are considered one of the most important platforms to promote the public participation process of urban heritage conservation in the context of rapid urbanization. 

I expected to find in the paper the specific way of the authors in which social media platforms are used to promote cultural heritage, not only the analysis of 19 articles from WoS. Also, I didn't found any mention/citation about virtual/digital exhibitions as tools to promote and valorize the cultural heritage collections. 

Author Response

Point 1: I didn't find any mention/citation about virtual/digital exhibitions as tools to promote and valorize the cultural heritage collections.

Response 1: We checked our article again and recategorized the interactive method from the selected article into 7 ways: Official announcement; Exhibition; Communication; Photosharing; Mapping; Storytelling; Crowdsourcing. In which, Digital exhibition is supplemented. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf