Role Expectations in Public Digital Cultural Resources Integration Projects

Abstract

A public digital cultural resources integration project involves the participation of multiple public cultural institutions, which must undertake different roles and accomplish the project’s missions through cooperation. In this study, we employed some concepts from the role expectation framework from role theory (including the designation and assignment of role expectations, and the designation and assignment of role functions), examined extant literature to obtain the roles of agents and their functions in a collaborative project, designed a role function system, and conducted interviews and a survey with workers in public cultural institutions. The results show that in China’s resources integration projects, there is stronger willingness for institutions to cooperate with institutions of similar administrative ranks; the institutions’ role expectations should be considered when assigning roles, and adequate roles should be given to each entity, with particular notice paid to mediation and coordination from third-party organizations; based on adequate role assignment, the role functions should be further detailed and elaborated at the start of the project.

An exploration of ethnic minorities' needs for multilingual information access of public digital cultural services

“…It was found that the most referred barriers from the perspective of cultural institutions of PDCS include lack of awareness, funding, technology, insufficient policies and intellectual property laws, management difficulties and digital standardization (Xiao and Wanyan, 2015). Xiao et al . (2016) also introduced the role expectation framework to analyze how to cooperate with different institutions of PDCS to integrate all roles, like initiators, leaders, supporters and implementers.…”

“…It was found that the most referred barriers from the perspective of cultural institutions of PDCS include lack of awareness, funding, technology, insufficient policies and intellectual property laws, management difficulties and digital standardization (Xiao and Wanyan, 2015). Xiao et al (2016) also introduced the role expectation framework to analyze how to cooperate with different institutions of PDCS to integrate all roles, like initiators, leaders, supporters and implementers. According to Wanyan and Dai (2019), there were remarkable differences in government funding, ICT propagation, peoples' cultural and digital information literacy of PDCS because of regional differences, especially in the less-developed central and western regions.…”