Contents:
- Executive Summary
- Overview of Figures by Sector
- 1. Purpose of this Study
- 2. Defining Digitisation
- 3. Cost-Models for Digitisation
- 4. Understanding Formats
- 5. A Structured Approach to Normalising Costs
- 6. The Scale of European Cultural Heritage
- 7. The Cost of Digitising Libraries
- 8. The Cost of Digitising Museums
- 9. The Cost of Digitising Archives
- 10. The Cost of Digitising AV Material
- 11. The Cost of Digitising European Cultural Heritage
- 12. Comparisons
- 13. Methodology
- 14. Bibliography
The purpose of this study was to conduct a thorough investigation of the costs associated with digitising different types of material in different types of cultural heritage institutions, in particular libraries, museums and archives in Europe. The objective: to arrive at a set of reasonable projected costs for the Digitisation of Europe’s cultural heritage.
Although this report’s purpose is to define the ‘cost of digitization’, it actually presents an interesting look at the overall cultural heritage management landscape. It succeeds well in illustrating how the models of digitization differ in different domains (libraries, museums, archive and the av domain); makes an interesting distinction between digitization as ‘conversion’ vs ‘surrogacy’, as well as digitization that supports preservation, curation and research vs digital content creation (creating media assets used for discovery, (creative)-re-use and entertainment) and how these differences impact cost models. All reports on the ‘costs of digitization’ generally result in ‘this is an impossible task’; what sets this report apart is that it actually manages to come up not only with figures it justifies quite clearly, but interestingly compares them to the public expenditure of building the Joint Strike Fighter, providing library services in Europe and building 100 km of highway. The AV Collection section limits itself to the film, video and audio material (including music and sound recordings) held in museums, archives and libraries; broadcast collections are not included. Although prepared to inform policy makers in the European Commission, and in particular the ‘Comité de Sages’, it is also of interest to anyone seeking an overview of collections and digitization processes within these different cultural heritage management contexts.