Posted on Tuesday March 24, 2015

Updated on Monday November 6, 2023

ENUMERATE results

This page provides an overview of the results from the Core Surveys of the ENUMERATE project.

Core Surveys 1, 2 and 3 were carried out respectively in 2012, 2014 and 2015. The main findings are listed below. The datasets of these previous surveys can be found on the Enumerate Data Platform.

Core Survey 1

More than 2,500 institutions from 29 European countries participated in the survey and the number of valid responses is close to 2,000. Data have been statistically analysed and ENUMERATE’s first report into the state of digitisation in Europe's cultural heritage institutions is now available:

Survey Report on Digitisation in European Cultural Heritage Institutions 2012

Some highlights of the findings are:

83% of cultural heritage institutions have a digital collection;
20% of all collections have been digitised and c57% still needs to be digitised (for 23% of collections over all there is no need to digitise);
More than 50% of cultural heritage institutions collect born digital materials;
34% of institutions have a digitisation strategy;
85% of institutions use Web statistics to measure the use of their digital collections;
2 years from now institutions estimate to make twice as much of their collections accessible through Europeana as compared to today;
On average 3.3% of paid staff in all cultural heritage institutions is working full time on digitisation.

An example of the results:

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Core Survey 2

Nearly 1,400 heritage institutions participated in Core Survey 2. The Survey Report on Digitisation in European Cultural Heritage Institutions 2014 concludes a three-year period of EU financed monitoring of the digital heritage domain.

Some findings from the ENUMERATE Core 2 Survey report:

The number of institutions with a distinct digitisation policy is 36%, which is slightly higher than it was in 2012 (34%). However, more than 87% of institutions say they have a digital collection (this was 83% in Core Survey 1).
If we take all types of heritage institutions together, approximately 17% of the analogue collections has been digitally reproduced, whereas about 52% still needs to be digitised (for an estimated 30% of all collections there is no need to digitise).
If we cautiously assume that these 17% has been digitised in the past 10 years, it will take at least 30 years to meet the present digitisation needs of European heritage institutions.
As compared to Core Survey 1 progressively more institutions (51%) measure the number of times their digital metadata and digital objects are being accessed online. In 2012 this was 42%. Website statistics are the most popular monitoring instrument.
Estimates of the cost of digital collections show that the incidental costs - the costs of the initial creation or acquisition of digital collections - are higher (53%) than the structural costs - the costs of the on-going maintenance, enhancement and preservation of digital collections (47%).

Go to the ENUMERATE Data Platform to see all the results.

Core survey 3

About 1,000 institutions participated in the third version of the core survey between February and May 2015. The results are analysed in the Survey Report on Digitisation in European Cultural Heritage Institutions 2015. Some main findings of the report:

The collections

90% of the respondents are memory institutions with collections to be kept for future generations and 84% of institutions have a digital collection (83% in Core Survey 1, 87% in Core Survey 2).

Digitisation activity

41% of the institutions have a written digitisation strategy (34% in Core Survey 1; 36% in Core Survey 2).
60% of the institutions have born digital items (52% in Core Survey 1, 53% in Core Survey 2)

Digital access

Overall institutions report that they have 45% of their descriptive metadata online for general use. Libraries are at the high end for this indicator (68%), whereas museums have the lowest score (31%).
Overall institutions report that they have 32% of their digitally reproduced and born digital heritage collections online for general use. Again libraries are at the high end for this indicator (48%), whereas archives and other records offices have the lowest score (32%).

Digital preservation

26% of the institutions have a written digital preservation strategy that is endorsed by the management (23% in Core Survey 1; 26% in Core Survey 2)
47% of the institutions do not have a solution yet for long term preservation based on international standards for digital preservation (this was 48% in Core Survey 2)

Digitisation Expenditure

The estimated average budget for digital collections is €276,471
An average of 8 people are involved on a full-time basis in digital collection activities: 6 fte paid staff and 2 fte volunteers. The absolute number (8 fte) is the same as in Core Survey 2, but the ratio in Core Survey 2 was different (5 fte paid staff; 3 fte volunteers)

Core Survey 4

Nearly 1,000 institutions participated in the fourth version of the core survey in the summer of 2017. The results are analysed in the report on Access to Digital Resources of European Heritage 2017.

The (anonymised) raw data can be reviewed via an Excel document.

Some main findings of the report:

82% of the respondents have a digital collection. Most institutes have a rich mix of different cultural heritage materials.
42% of the institutions have a written digitisation strategy (was 41% in 2015).
More the have of the institutions (59%) have born digital items.
Overall institutions report that they have 51% of their descriptive metadata online for general use. Libraries are at the high end for this indicator (76%), whereas museums have the lowest score (33%).
Academic research is viewed as the most important reason to offer digital access to a collection (8.8 on a 10-point scale). Followed by Educational use (8.5). Sales and Commercial licenses are deemed least important.
42% of the digital objects managed by the participating institutes is not online available.
A notable outcome is that in the next two years respondents foresee a decline (-4%) in the number of objects digitally available through their own website. Respondents do expect an incline via external channels, like Social Media (+25%), Wikipedia (+14%), Europeana (+5%) and other aggregators (+11%).
45% of the institutions do not have a solution yet for long term preservation based on international standards for digital preservation (was 47% in 2015).

National reports

On this page national reports are published that were created based on the data collected in the ENUMERATE surveys.

The Netherlands

Both reports are licenced under CC BY-SA 3.0 NL