Swedish governmental policy insists on the need for public museums to turn to digital users.  This applies in particular the need for urban-centered societal institutions with regional responsibility, like regional public museums, to reach out to and include rural and coastal citizens. Most public Swedish museums today offer limited digital participatory opportunities to its users, such as blogs, on-line compe­titions, web shops, etc., however, still mostly at an experimental stage. The simple fact that there are various functioning forms for digital participa­tion available, does not in any simple way transform into actual, well-functioning user participation. Such practices instead need to become parts of museums’ overall strategies and also have to be thoroughly appropriated into everyday institutional practice.

Drawing on the notion of social demand (Olsson & Svensson 2012) this paper will present and discuss a research and development approach that we are applying in our effort to ana­lyse and to help elaborate instances of user participation among regional Swedish museums. In general terms, the approach is sensitive towards the web’s co-creative possibilities by help of analyses of best (participatory) web-practices, and it includes a research design that both accounts for and involves users’ deliberate and reflexive preferences.

More particularly, this paper will discuss strategies to examine the preferences of a regional museum’s users’ in general, and their rural and coastal potential users in particular. Drawing on methodology from audience research the paper will outline a potential design to document and map citizens demands on their regional (digital) museum.