signs of legitimacy -- we were used as a sampling site...

I've been pondering ways to assess the impact of Museums and the Web, given that we are approaching the tenth iteration of the event. Much of the benefit of the meeting is 'soft' and difficult to measure. Who met whom? Who's working with whom? Who married whom (well... at least that was publicly declared). How do you establish whether MW has impact?

Citation indexes / frequency would be one way. How often is the conference cited in the literature? But that would have to be taken in comparison with other events, or other 'sources'. Sounds like a tedious statistical analysis. Then I stumbled upon the following, in a paper reporting on a survey of digital museum activity:

No comprehensive list of digital repositories exists ... In order to identify digital repositories for this survey, the author created an initial list of institutions, which consisted of the members of the Research Libraries Group, http://www.rlg.org/, and the attendees of the Museums and the Web conferences ...

Rachel Bradley, "Digital Authenticity and Integrity: Digital Cultural Heritage Documents as Research Resources". portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 5, No 2 (2005) p. 168.

... if it's good enough for 'science' ...