IPABA checklist for heritage in Spanish: How to assess visibility and accessibility on the Web

Abstract

The authors propose a new index called IPABA –composed by the evaluation criteria: Identification, Presence, Audience, Browsability), Accesibility- for determining the potential visibility of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Spain and Mexico on the basis of their official websites. This index is based on a checklist which includes new categories and items that influence the visibility of these websites. The sample is exhaustive, comprising the 114 Mexican and Spanish websites that are the official, government-sanctioned online representations of the World Heritage Sites in question. The results reveal changes in social behavior with regard to communication. The majority of the websites assessed had an overall score that was very acceptable with more than 650 points of a maximum of 1000, although differences were observed between countries in terms of presence on social networks.