Digitisation and Preservation - Statistics and Evaluation

I have seen a range of presentations on Digitisation and Preservation. There was an afternoon of about 7 papers which covered a lot of ground and were very interesting. Two papers looked at statistics for Cultural Heritage from Bavarian State Library and British Library both talking about data driven methods for what should be considered for preservation.

What I found most interesting in this afternoon was the overview of the Numeric project and a case study from the Netherlands. There may be many of you who are already aware of this project but it was the first time I came across it. Its goal is to get a snapshot of the present state of digitisation in Europe (ie what has been done at what cost and what remains to be done and what that will cost) . They are using a survey instrument but have encountered all sorts of issues on how institutions count and define units of measure for digitisation activities (ie via page or volume). There is no standard way to articulate what is done. They have has to refine and define terms and units of measurement to enable data collection and have tested the survey with relevant cultural institutions ie (archives, museums and libraries).

Some statistical findings that are interesting;

Financing digitisation activities across the sector (archives/museums/ libraries)
Internal funds 68%, Project funds 26% and Donations 6%,

Doing the digitisation 56% self, 37% contracted, 4% via collaboration

The average yearly expenditure for digitisation activities across archives, libraries and museums is 106,128 Euro

Labour costs represent 70% of total digitisation budget for Libraries

It is estimated that across all institutions 19.3% of relevant material is digitised, 30,2% does not need to be digitised and 50.8% outstanding digitisation.

There was also consideration given to impact of making this material available and some ways of measuring have been explored ie usage of items, types of uses, projected based on digitised collections, knowledge of cultural heritage.

Also discussed was the need to "digitise" monuments and natural environments/sites and examples of significant architectural achievements even zoo's were mentioned....

Following this overview of the Numeric project a case study from the Netherlands was presented - they had used the survey as a basis to do a nationwide survey of digitisation.(Digital Facts project). It covered 128 heritage institutions. The encountered some definition issues as well with the word "digitisation" - archival institutions understood it as creating a digital image or surrogate but many libraries understood it as creating metadata about the object or catalogue record. They found there is also no history of documenting digitisation but it was clearly moving from an outsourced function to core business.

Joe if you are reading this the Europe are spoilt for choice with book scanners...the exhibition has 8 vendors touting equipment from the mighty Kirtas to the Zurchetel(not sure on spelling) and many others...perhaps we should digitise off shore to take advantage of the cutting edge equipment.....if you can get clearance i am happy to scout out a location ..;)