Cultural Heritage Information: Artefacts and Digitization Technologies

Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Humanities, Department of Information Studies,

University College London
[email protected]

Terras, M. (2015). "Cultural Heritage Information: Artefacts and Digitization

Technologies" In Chowdhury, G. and Ruthven, I. (2015). "Cultural Heritage
information", London: Facet. p. 63-88.

Since the 1970s, the gallery, library, archive, and museum sector has promoted and
encouraged digitization - the conversion of analog into digital information - to
increase access to cultural heritage material through various incarnations of digital
media. Indeed, it is now expected by both users and professionals that institutions
should be undertaking digitization programs, and best practices in this area are now
well documented and understood. This chapter scopes out the background to the
current digitization environment, giving an overview of the methods and approaches
involved. It points to current developments, highlighting the use of both two and three
dimensional capture methods for the creation of digital surrogates of objects and
artefacts, indicating the potential for further development in the sector, whilst drawing
attention to current issues faced when digitizing objects and artefacts including cost,
sustainability, impact evaluation, and expectation management in the changing
information environment. The affordances of previously prohibitively expensive
techniques – such as multi-spectral imaging and 3D scanning – are now available at
relatively inexpensive rates, which also raises questions about digital literacy and our
understanding of what it means, for both the end user and information professional, to
create digital versions of our cultural inheritance.

1. Digitization of cultural and heritage content

Digitization, “the conversion of an analog signal or code into a digital signal or code”
(Lee 2002, 3), is now commonplace across the heritage sector, as digital
representations of cultural and historical documents, artefacts, and images are created,
usually for putting into institutional repositories and for featuring on websites,
encouraging remote viewing by online users. Digitization may appear to be a recent
phenomenon in memory institutes, but the current state of affairs where libraries,
archives, museums, galleries, and even private individuals are expected to make
available their collections in digital form follows a period of experimentation with
and appropriation of available digital technologies which dates back almost forty
years (see Terras 2010 for a fuller account of the history of digitization). The
information, culture, and heritage sectors were quick to embrace digitization
technologies as they became available, primarily to facilitate access to items in
collections by providing them in electronic format, firstly with the creation of
electronic catalogues in the 1970s, then conversion of printed source material into
digital files in the 1980s (van Horick 2005). One of the first digitization projects was
the “Optical Digital Image Storage System (ODISS)” launched in 1984 by The
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington which aimed
to test the utility of digital image and optical disk technologies for the reproduction,
storage and retrieval of archival documents (see González 1992, 1998, and NARA
1991 for an overview).

As network infrastructure grew, and the cost of computational devices fell, users
increasingly consumed digitized content (Naughton 2000), and libraries, archives, and
museums continued to experiment with the appropriate application of digital
technologies within their institutional remit, being keen to embrace digitization which
give potential for “for learning, teaching, research, scholarship, documentation, and
public accountability” (Kenney and Rieger 2000, p. 1). In the 1980s, digitization
generally focused on specific in house material such as particular manuscripts,
paintings or artefacts, usually targeting resources to digitize rare documents or objects
with high scholarly value. A prime example of this is the digitization of the Beowulf
manuscript in the British Library, with publication of the Electronic Beowulf in 1992
(Kiernan 1981, Kiernan 1991, Prescott 1997).

In the 1990s, as the cost of capture and processing equipment fell, and access to
resources increased, many organisations moved towards a more large scale
digitization of their holdings, galvanised in part by the availability of funding by
national bodies. For example, the UK government’s Joint Information System’s
Committee (a centralised body supported by all four of the Higher Education funding
bodies for Scotland, England, Northern Ireland, and Wales) announced a variety of
initiatives to encourage the development of Electronic Libraries (or ELib) related
resources, and infrastructure and services to support the use of digital content in
Higher Education. More than £100 million was spent on digitization in this area in the
UK by JISC by the close of the 1990s (Jisc 2010). An example of an ELib funded
project typical of the scope of digitization carried out at the time is the “Internet
Library of Early Journals”1 a joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds,
Manchester and Oxford, which digitized some 200,000 pages of 18th and 19th century
journals (ILEJ 1999). At the start of the 1990s, then, “In the early days of the Web,
museums provided some of the best content and some of the most compelling reasons
to go on-line” (Peacock et al 2004). Towards the close of the millennium, “A decade
of digitization and documentation for the Web … created a rich array of cultural and
historical information across the museum, library and archive sectors” (ibid).

Links with commercial information providers, such as Google and Microsoft, and
mass digitization of printed content, followed in the 2000s. By avoiding the targeted
approach of digitization favoured by the funding councils, these industry providers
have the resources to digitize everything they possibly can, often in conjunction with
world leading institutions who cannot afford to digitize their holdings in such an all
encompassing manner. The belief is that the supporting computational infrastructure
is developed enough to search through vast repositories of digitized content (Google
Books 2007). However, such digitization initiatives bring with them very difficult
issues regarding copyright, and access, and also raise questions about the potential
exploitation of their dominance of ownership of digitized versions of cultural and
heritage content (Singel 2009).

At time of writing, the interest in the adoption of new technologies to forward

institutional aims is keenly felt as the costs of digital technology and storage media
continue to fall, and processing power – or what we can do with digitized content
once it is acquired – continues to advance. Research is ongoing into advanced
digitization capture practices, such as the use of multi-spectral imaging (a process that
captures image data at specific frequencies across the visible and invisible spectrum)

1 http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/
to uncover detail in cultural and heritage objects. An example of this is a project
which has collected multi-spectral data on the degradation of an 18th century
parchment by a series of physical and chemical treatments, in order to inform best
practice on how to image similarly damaged texts (MacDonald et al 2013). The
affordances of 3D capture and 3D printing are also being explored in the GLAM
sector, such as the E-Curator project2 which established the value of 3D models for
sharing detailed information about museum objects among curators and conservators
(Robson et al 2012).

Moving beyond capture practices, the use of social media, the relationship of social
media to more staid digitization practices, and the relationship of institutions to
individuals, are being investigated as the sector explores these relatively low cost
mechanisms for dissemination of digitized material (Terras 2011). An example of this
is the British Library’s “Mechanical Curator”3 which randomly selects artwork from
their database and posts it to a Tumblr blog every hour. The logical conclusion of this
is the use of social media platforms in conjunction with digitized content to ask online
users to help with tasks in the cultural and heritage sectors, through a process known
as “crowd-sourcing”. For example, the digitized manuscripts of the philosopher and
social reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1842) have been put online via a wikimedia
platform and are being transcribed by volunteer labour in the Transcribe Bentham4
project (see Causer and Terras Forthcoming): more than 3 million words of
Bentham’s writing have now been transcribed, speeding up the costly process of
creating machine readable text from digitized images of manuscript material.

There is also huge interest in the cultural sector for the possibilities that are inherent
in “Linked Data”: the ability to link or merge data with sources that follow other
standards, to allow different collections of digitized content to be searched, analyzed
and visualized (de Boer et al 2012). An example of this is the British Museum’s
Research Space5 which is developing a range of flexible tools to search across the two

2
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/petrie/research/research-
projects/3dpetrie/3d_projects/3d-projects-past/e-curator
3
http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com/
4
www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham
5
http://www.researchspace.org/
million objects in the museum’s collections, which, in time, will also search across
other institution’s catalogues, documents, images, and records. Research in
digitization therefore is still ongoing, as we investigate the possibilities involved in
new technologies and platforms in capture, reuse, and dissemination of digitized
content.

2. The Digitization process

Digitization is dependent on capturing a representation of existing, analogue material
(as opposed to “born digital” media which was created on a computational system). It
is important to establish that the act of digitization is one of translation: the resulting
digitized representation of an original analogue object is not a replacement for the
object. Computational systems depend on exact numerical strings. The ordinary, or
“real” world, of our senses exists in a continuous flowing stream of signals across
time and often space. A document – or even a traditional photograph of a document -
exists in analogue, where a varying signal represents a continuous range of values. In
order to record, copy, transmit, or analyse such a complex signal using computational
methods, it is necessary to translate this into a form which is more simple, predictable,
and processable. All telecommunication systems work with one underlying principle:
the information to be sent is converted into signals which can be transmitted, and
reassembled on reception, to be converted into something we can perceive as a fair
copy of the original. Digital systems are those which rely on a sequence of discreet
numeric values, rather than the unconstrained and continually varying qualities of
analogue signals. Numeric values are used in digital systems for processing, display,
transmission, and input: often sampling values from analogue sources in the process
we call “digitization”. Digital systems rely on the binary numeric system, where all
numbers are represented using only two symbols, such as 0 and 1, known as binary
digits or “bits”. Strings of bits can build up a representation of text, image, sound, or
3D object, but the more complex the representation, the more bits are required to
describe it, and the more complicated the mechanisms are that are required to capture,
store, display, process, analyse, and convert the information held in the binary data
stream.
Providing a digital representation of an analogue object has various advantages: the
digital representation can usually be more easily copied, shared, accessed, analysed
and processed than the original (providing users have access to computational
infrastructure – such as machines, software, networks, and subscriptions, which
should not always be taken from granted, see Gooding 2013). The creation of
digitized versions of primary historical sources also opens up new potential for
research using advanced computational methods, to show different facets,
relationships, views, or details of the original content. However it should always be
remembered, that although digital representations of historical artefacts can be
seductive, they are not the historical artefact itself, as they are only a digital
representation limited to what has been captured during the sampling process:
A digital representation of an artefact is a representation of certain relevant
characteristics of the artefact. It is not the original and complete artefact, nor
even a metonymy or simulacrum of the complete artefact. It is only a
representation of some “relevant characteristics” (Arnold 2008, p. 127).

2.1 Digitization Technologies

The digitization methods available to the cultural and heritage sector are dependent on
those which are commercially available, and affordable: these have changed over the
past few years as the costs of digital capture equipment have fallen. For most of the
1980s and 1990s, scanning was the most commonly used way to capture digital
versions of historic content, and scanners were often used in conjunction with
traditional photography, to capture a photographic representation of an object or text
with the resulting slide, photograph, or microfilm being converted to a digital version.
In 2002, Deegan and Tanner (p.34) describe the range of digitization processes which
are commonly used, including scanning of existing image material, microfilming and
then scanning the microfilm, photography followed by scanning of the photographic
surrogates, rekeying (typing in) of textual content, OCR (Optical Character
Recognition) of scanned textual content, encoding textual content to create a marked-
up digital resource, and advanced imaging techniques for large format or specialist
items. In the last few years, as the costs of digital camera equipment has fallen
(FutureSource 2008), it is increasingly common to use digital cameras (specifically,
Digital SLRs which have high quality lenses but a “digital back”) to capture digital
2D and 3D images of cultural and heritage objects, without digitizing existing
surrogate material (such as scanning existing photographs):
The introduction of digital camera backs as a means of digitization has
superseded the previous methods which were flatbed and drum scanners. Both
of these scanning methods are now obsolete and the standard for high-quality
digitization nowadays is the use of professional digital camera backs in
medium and large format made by companies such as Mamiya Leaf and Phase
One. The accuracy and quality of the optical lens system used by these
cameras is essential in minimising distortion. This method of capture … is
also far quicker than the traditional scanning method as well as producing a
higher quality image. This is due to the increase in size of the image sensor,
commonly a CCD (charge-coupled device) chip in digital camera backs as
well as the difference of the image sensor being static rather than having to
pane across underneath the slide in a flatbed scanner… One of the advantages
when using digital camera back duplication setups is the greater control over
the light source, which is a lightbox consisting of a photographic flash with a
uniform colour temperature… Since the launch of professional digital back
cameras, there has been little development in scanning technology (Weidner
2013).

Nowadays, digital SLR cameras are the most commonly used technology for taking
still images of cultural and heritage content: even the market leading “book scanners”
commonly used in mass digitization projects, such as the Atiz Book Drive Pro6 are
actually composed of digital cameras mounted over a cradle. Images of text can be
converted into electronic text through ever-advancing improvements in OCR
technology, or by keying in (which is often outsourced to developing countries).
Sound and moving images can also be digitized, by converting video and audio into
digital formats, and a range of technologies exist to aid in their conversion. (For up to
date, accessible introductions to a range of digitization technologies for a variety of
media, the Jisc Digital Media service maintains a wealth of online material on this
topic, see http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/creating). Moving away from purely two-
dimensional representations of artifacts, 3D scanning technologies are now being

6
http://pro.atiz.com/
explored for used in the cultural and heritage sectors as the technology becomes more
affordable (Robson et al 2012). 3D capture is also allied with 3D printing of the
resulting models, and the sector is investigating how 3D printing technology can be
gainfully used. There is also great interest in using and broadcasting the content from
digitization via social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Flickr,
providing institutions with a relatively easy way to increase public engagement with
digitized content, with projects building “crowdsourcing” platforms which ask for the
general public’s help in categorizing, analyzing, cataloguing, reading, and
transcribing digitized material. Capture of digitized content can therefore lead to a
variety of useful outcomes for an institution.

It should also be noted that whilst the digitization process creates core content for
digital resources, it is a time consuming and costly task. Additional infrastructure is
also required in order to deliver digitized material in a useful manner (such as a
database or content management system, a website front end, some kind of
explanatory apparatus or additional teaching materials, the resources to engage
frequently with online visitors and to update content, and, in the case of crowd-
sourcing, helping recruit and retain volunteers). Project management, and records
creation and cataloguing of each digital item is often more time consuming than the
creation of digital surrogates themselves (Boughida et al 2011). A digitization project
should thus be seen as a range of activities which result in digital representations of
historical source material being captured, catalogued, stored, and made accessible to
target users, potentially for a range of uses and in a variety of guises: it is not just
simply about the act of scanning or taking photographs of artefacts and objects.

2.2 Digitization Guidelines

Producing digital versions of holdings through digitization has become an industry in

itself, and there has been much effort devoted to producing guides to best practice for
undertaking the digitization of library and archive material to provide a framework in
which those who wish to undertake digitization of primary source materials can
operate. The issue is that there are now over forty different guidelines for undertaking
digitization in existence, and each of those
 is a complex, multifaceted production. Each represents a synthesis of
experience, drawn in part from earlier versions of a given guideline and in part
from secondary literature, workshops and conference presentations (and other
forms of hearsay), and the specific experience of consultants and other experts
who develop a specific guideline (Conway 2009, p. 10).
Care should therefore be taken as to which guidelines are followed and used for
advice, and part of project planning is to decide the protocols, benchmarks and
procedures that a digitization project will use within a specific institutional context.
Jisc Digital Media7 (is a good first port of call for up to date digitization advice, but
other commonly consulted and respected guidelines include the “Library of Congress
Technical Standards for Digital Conversion of Text and Graphic Materials” (2006)
and the U.S.A’s National Archives “Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival
Materials for Electronic Access: Creation of Production Master Files – Raster
Images” (Puglia et al 2004). However, available digitization technology has changed
considerably since the most commonly used guidelines were written, and best practice
in newer techniques, such as the use of 3D scanning in the cultural and heritage
industry, is still being established (Robson et al 2012).

3. Digitization in Libraries, Archives, and Museums

Anything visual that is accessible to photography can be digitized, and the range of
digitized material in the cultural and heritage sector is as broad as the range of
material held in libraries, archives, museums, archaeological sites, and private
collections, including (but not limited to): printed books, printed journals,
manuscripts, maps, photographs, photographic transparencies, music manuscripts,
woodcuts, line drawings, paintings, archaeological site plans, archaeological finds,
blueprints and architectural illustrations or plans, medical illustrations, documents,
correspondence, newspapers, papyri, sculpture, clothing, artifacts, objet, furniture,
buildings, archaeological sites, and any nature of ephemera.

7
http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/
There are many reasons why a program of digitization of cultural and heritage
material may take place, and there are a variety of potential advantages, which are
summarized by Deegan and Tanner (2002):
immediate access to high-demand and frequently used items; easier access to
individual components within items (e.g. articles within journals); rapid access
to materials held remotely; the ability to reinstate out of print materials; the
potential to display materials that are in inaccessible formats, for instance,
large volumes, or maps; ‘virtual reunifaction’ – allowing dispersed collections
to be brought together; the ability to enhance digital images in terms of size,
sharpness, colour contrast, noise reduction, etc.; the potential to conserve
fragile/precious objects while presenting surrogates in more accessible forms;
the potential for integration into teaching materials; enhanced searchability,
including full text; integration of digital media (images, sounds, video, etc.);
the ability to satisfy requests for surrogates (photocopies, photographic prints,
slides, etc.); reducing the burden of cost of delivery; the potential for
presenting a critical mass of materials (p. 32-33).
In addition to this, there is further potential for raising revenue from the licensing of
digitized content, raising the profile of institutions, and increased public engagement
and knowledge transfer opportunities (Terras 2012). However, there are also good
reasons not to digitize content: Hughes (2004, p. 50-52), summarizes issues which
cause problems in digitization projects, including unresolved copyright issues, lack of
adequate funding, lack of institutional support, technical drawbacks, the potential for
digitization to damage or compromise fragile or rare original materials, and issues
which arise when digitization is used instead of adequate conservation techniques or
instead of robust cataloguing systems. It is worth stressing that digitization is a costly
and time-consuming endeavor, and projects are expensive to deliver, manage, and
sustain (Denbo et al 2008): not everything is worth digitizing, once things are
digitized the resulting representations have to be maintained and looked after, and
therefore strategic choices need to be made as to where resources are best employed.

3.1 Digitization in Institutional Contexts

The potential inherent in digitization is dependent on a variety of factors, including,
but not limited to; the nature of the primary source content; the approach of the
project; the technology available, appropriated, and used; and the aims of the
institution. The potential and nature of digitization therefore varies greatly from
program to program and project to project, even within institutions. Looking at recent
digitization initiatives in the author’s home institution – University College London –
alone, can give some indication as to the different scope and remit of digitization
initiatives.

Digitization projects can revolve around one object and what it means for a particular
community: for example, a project based at UCL and the British Museum8 digitized a
12 metre long plank-built war canoe from the Melanesian Southwest Pacific, dating
from 1910. 3D laser scanning, paired with anthropological research, delivered a
holistic virtual reconstruction, multimedia interactive delivery, and a 3D printed
colour replica of a detail of the boat for digital repatriation to the source community
(Hess et al 2009). This project was therefore a research project as well as one to
create content: from the ethnographic point of view, the team were exploring how
digitization technologies could work with museums and communities to build links
around a particular object which now physically resides in a museum on the other side
of the world to the community who revere it. From a technical point of view, the team
were researching how best to utilize 3D scanning within this context. There is
therefore still opportunity for digitization to be a fruitful research topic: as new
technologies develop their potential and affordances for the cultural sector should be
investigated.

In a larger project at UCL, digitization can be seen to be used to build up an

illustrated catalogue of a particular collection. UCL Art Museum9 holds over 10,000
paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures dating from the 1490s to the present day,
including an important collection of 16th-century German drawings and Old Master
prints by Dürer, Rembrandt and Van Dyck, later watercolour material by JMW
Turner, Thomas Rowlandson and Joseph Wright of Derby and a unique archive of

8 http://www.mhm.ucl.ac.uk/mhm-research/western-solomon-islands-war-canoe.php
9
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/uclart/
works by staff and students from the Slade School of Fine Art, one of the leading art
school’s in the world, based at UCL. A digitization project based in the UCL Art
Museum is gradually cataloguing and digitizing prints to create a definitive online
catalogue of the art museum’s holdings10 over a number of years, dependent on a
variety of relatively small internal and external sources of funding. The online
database is a work in progress as records are checked and updated, and images of
digitized content are added, as they are created, and at time of writing includes around
eighty percent of the collection. This online resource allows those interested in the
contents of the UCL Art Museum to understand the scope of their holdings, and to
find and refer to works in the collection more easily. The eventual addition of digital
images of the art to its associated record will mean that users can access this catalogue
online prior to visiting the Museum and requesting the artwork in question.
Digitization, in this project, is then primarily used to assist access and record keeping,
as well as to promote the content of the UCL Art Museum, and to assist both casual
browsers and researchers in understanding the scale of its holdings. The digitization
is being undertaken in-house as funding allows, with the resulting catalogue being
hosted on UCL’s own library servers, as part of an institution-wide activity to
catalogue and make accessible the collections of various museums within UCL. The
museum also links closely into UCL’s teaching programme: with workplacement
students from the Master’s degree in Digital Humanities aiding in the project, and
suggesting and implementing new ways in which the image based content can be
used. It has been noted, using UCL museums as a case study, that university libraries
and museums can provide an ideal platform to experiment with different modes of
digital delivery of cultural and heritage content (Nelson and MacDonald 2012).

At the other end of the scale of digitization, the mass creation of digital records of a
range of collections can be achieved to foster access to anyone in the internet-wide
community who may wish to use them, collaborating in larger, federated digitization
efforts. Another project at UCL, Europeana Travel 11 , digitized “over a million
resources including maps, manuscripts, photos, films, books and postcards on the
themes of travel, tourism, trade routes and exploration” to “enable public access to

10 http://artcat.museums.ucl.ac.uk/
11
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/europeanatravel/
previously unpublished travel memories” (UCL Library Services 2009). This is part
of the European Commission's eContentplus Programme 12 , a centrally managed
programme which is digitizing material from cultural heritage institutions to feed into
the Europeana13 portal that links to tens of millions of digital resources from over
2000 museums, archives, libraries and audiovisual collections from all over Europe.
Digitization in this project has a different set of aims than the previous projects, is
undertaken at industrial scale, and is driven also by policy and strategy from beyond
the home institution. This has an impact on project planning, and the range of
standards and technologies used, to ensure that resulting outputs can be used in
conjunction with those of the other Europeana partners.

The act of digitization - creating a digital version of the primary source material - may
be technically similar in all three of these projects, but the purview, scope, output, and
infrastructure surrounding both projects from the same institution differs greatly
depending on the project aims, objectives, and purpose.

4. The Current Digitization Cultural Environment

Given the range and scope of activity in creating digitized content in the cultural and
heritage sectors, it has been difficult to follow and fully comprehend how digitization
is now being used and appropriated in galleries, libraries, museums, and archives, and
“statistical data on Europe’s digital heritage is tentative and scattered at best”
(Enumerate, 2013). To counteract this issue the European Commission funded a
project called Enumerate14 under its ICT Policy Support Programme. The Enumerate
project runs for three years from February 2011 and aims to “create a reliable baseline
of statistical data about digitization, digital preservation and online access to cultural
heritage in Europe” (ibid). In 2012, Enumerate published its “Survey Report on
Digitization in European Cultural Heritage Institutions” (Stroeker and Vogels 2012),
which gave a snapshot of current digitization activity in the sector, gathering

12

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/apps/projects/index.cfm?menu=secondary&pr
og_id=ECP
13
http://www.europeana.eu/portal/
14
http://www.enumerate.eu
responses from 2000 institutions (including many national libraries and archives)
across 29 European countries. The survey ascertained the state of digitization within
each organisation, whilst also asking about expenditure, access to digital collections,
and the institutional digital preservation strategy.

83% of the institutions which responded were partaking in digitization activities in

2011, and 100% of National Libraries have a digital collection. Only about 20% of
the materials which are deemed to be important enough to be digitized currently are:
Art Museums have the highest percentage of digitized content, averaging at 42% of
their holdings, whilst National Libraries only have 4% of their content digitized,
although they have a target to get 62% of their collections digitized within time.
Photographs are the most digitized object type – 66% of respondents have digitized
them, with 46% of institutions digitising archival records, 35% digitising drawings,
32% digitising posters, 31% digitising postcards, 29% digitising rare books, 29%
digitising paintings, and less than a quarter of institutions digitising non-rare books,
newspapers, serials, sheet music, microfilms, and video and audio recordings. The
least digitized formats were 3D objects (7%) and whole monuments and sites (8%),
showing that there are still issues in dealing with the organizational complexities, and
temporal and financial investment needed, to capture these.

34% of institutions have their own written digitization strategy, and almost one third
(half in the case of national libraries) are included in a national digitization strategy.
31% of institutions have some kind of policy for the use of their digital collections,
and 23% of institutions have a written digital preservation strategy. 85% of
institutions say that they use web statistics to measure the use of their digital
collections, yet only 42% of them say that they actively monitor use. These statistics
indicate that there is much more to be done to ensure that digitization is a planned,
targeted activity where the ramifications of the investment of limited resources are
understood.

The Enumerate project reveals that digitization is resource intensive: the national
libraries have on average 15 staff involved in the digitization process, whilst other
types of institutions have a team of around 5.5 staff (in total, 3.3% of all staff in
cultural heritage institutions are working on digitization). The costs of digitization are
in the range of EUR20,000 to EUR40,000 per full time member of staff, unless the
project involves audio-visual digitization, when the costs rise to EUR103,000 per full
time member of staff. The use of volunteers is common, being mostly used at
archives and records offices. Funding for digitization is sourced from internal budgets
in 87% of the institutions, although 40% mention some form of public grant or
subsidy, 5% say they raised finances via private investment, and 4% indicate that they
had some commercial sponsorship.

It can be seen, then, that digitization is now a core activity across the heritage sector,
although there is a significant way to go until all the content that institutions deem
worthy and necessary of digitization is captured, and that this will require much
further financial investment and support from the sector, over a long period of time, to
reach the goals they have set themselves in delivering digitized cultural and heritage
material. It should also be considered that the more accessible digitized content that
there is, the more useful existing content will be, as rich connections can be made
across collections, encouraging excellence in research, learning, and teaching.

5. Impact and Expectation

Although there has been significant investment in digitization in the cultural and
heritage sectors for decades, it can be difficult to prove the value of this activity. This
is increasingly necessary in an economic climate where “impact” of publicly funded
activity is measured and evaluated: “The global economic decline that began in 2007
has led to serious cuts in funding for almost all humanities and cultural heritage
initiatives, including the development of, and support for, digital collections” (Hughes
2012, p.2). Yet it is difficult to establish value: “Digital resources are valuable to
different audiences for different reasons, and some value may not be realized
immediately… Value is subjective, changes over time and has different meanings that
are contingent on external factors” (ibid, p. 5-7). In response to this issue, Tanner
(2011) suggests that there are five different modes of value in digitized resources, in
order to provide an impact assessment of the often intangible benefits of digitization.
There is Option Value to digitized resources: when people enjoy the digitized content,
and produce some form of output, such as research output by academics. There is
Prestige Value, where people derive utility from knowing that a digitized resource is
cherished by individuals both inside and outside of their community. There is
Education Value, where people are aware that their digitized resources contribute to
their own or other’s education, training, and knowledge. There is Existence Value,
where people benefit from knowing that a resource exists, even if they do not use it
themselves. And finally, there is Bequest Value, where people derive satisfaction
from the fact their communities will be able to access these resources in the future
(p.34). Tanner’s modes of value are an extremely useful taxonomy for those
attempting to frame discussion of the potential – or known – impact of their
digitization project, to show the benefits that it could possible have to a range of
users, and perhaps persuade funding sources of the necessity for digitization. An
alternative means of assessing impact is provided by TIDSR (Toolkit for the Impact
of Digitized Scholarly Resources 15 ), funded by the JISC e-Content Impact and
Embedding Programme, which provides a framework of both qualitative (interviews,
focus groups) and quantitative (log analysis) methods for assessing the use of a digital
resource. At a time of rapid development and creation of digitized resources, we are
only now being able to frame discussions about the use and usefulness of them: “The
value, impact and use of collections take time to evolve and to be understood, and this
needs to be reconciled in a world of responsive, short-term funding opportunities”
(Hughes 2012, p.10).

The current lack of external funding for the creating of digitized material can be
juxtaposed with issues of user expectations regarding digitized content. With ongoing
changes in networked technologies, including the emergence of ever-connected
smartphones in the digital environment, the number of potential users of digitized
cultural and heritage content has increased enormously. Expectations have been raised
that all content is available digitally (even though, as we have seen above, only a
small fraction of institutional holdings are currently available in digital format).
Expectations and needs of potential user groups differ, and it can be difficult for
heritage organizations to be agile enough to respond to a rapidly changing

15
http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/
information environment, and the needs of users who learn their digital behaviour
mostly through engaging with well resourced commercial websites:
Digital tools have worked their way into every aspect of our lives. Even those
people with high levels of digital fluency take for granted the increased levels
of speed, access and mobility that as little as three years ago were hard to
imagine. For many, the possibilities still feel a little bit sci-fi-esque, but as
William Gibson observed so insightfully in 2003, “the future is already here –
it’s just not evenly distributed”. This is as true for the cultural sector as
anyone, with many organisations struggling to embrace the new reality of
audience behaviour, let alone go boldly into a future of big data, the semantic
web and seamless participation (Finnis 2013, quoted in Malde et al 2013, p.2).
A report recently published by Culture24, a non-profit cultural organization which
supports arts and heritage venues to reach audiences, suggests that institutions should
look at the range of digital material they are creating, and the way it is delivered, and
to encourage: the measurement of value (both what the institution and their users
value, before exploring how these can be enhanced through digital channels); regular
reporting and analysis of what works for the institution and what doesn’t; a focus on
user behavior and demand, moving away from the institutional supply-driven model
of digital content; understanding the changing behaviours of audiences; being honest
about the effort and time it takes for digital activities to be carried out; understanding
web, mobile, and social behaviours; and to conduct experiments in the way content is
created, communicated and delivered (Malde et al 2013, p- 5-6). This will, then,
affect the digitization policy and strategy of an organization: “The starting point
should… be the mission of the organisation and the needs of the target audience. You
need to know what you want to achieve and who it is for” (ibid, p.4.). Perhaps the
biggest change in digitization in recent years is this necessary move towards
understanding user needs and communities, rather than creating “scan and dump” or
“build it and they will come” digitization projects (Warwick et al, 2008). Although, as
we have seen in the Enumerate survey above, only one third of major cultural and
heritage institutions across Europe have considered their digitization activities in
enough detail to have such a policy.

6. Digital Literacy and Digitized Content

It is also worth returning, here, to the issue of representation in digitization, in the
light of increased user expectation and regular use of digital media. As people turn to
the digital as a convenient means to view and access a wide variety of digitised
cultural and heritage content, we have to ask: do they understand the processes which
created it, and what they are looking at for evidence, or sources of information? The
persuasive nature of digital visualisation and display can mean we do not stop to
question the very nature of digitized content:
its labor of production has been concealed and therefore bears less evidence of
authorship, provenance, originality, and other commonly accepted
characteristics attributed to physical objects. For these reasons the digital
object’s materiality is not well understood (Cameron 2007, p.70).
Understanding digitisation is then a particular extension of digital literacy:
the confident and critical use of Information Society Technology (IST) for
work, leisure and communication. It is underpinned by basic skills in ICT: the
use of computers to retrieve, assess, store, produce, present and exchange
information, and to communicate and participate in collaborative networks via
the Internet (Digital Literacy, 2010).
This is combined with information literacy:
knowing when and why you need information, where to find it, and how to
evaluate, use and communicate it in an ethical manner (CILIP 2013).
Those creating digital material, and particularly digitized cultural and heritage
content, have an obligation to their users to explain the nature of the resources they
are publishing, and fully documenting and describing them (something which seldom
happens). Indeed, there may be a further obligation to inform the user community
about issues of representation so they fully understand the material that they are
accessing: this particularly comes into play when dealing with advanced
representations of material, such as 3D scans, or multi-spectral images, where it is
difficult to understand the relationship of the primary historical source to its digital
representation. If institutions, and by extension, their users, do not understand the
digitization process, can our interpretation of digitized material ever be robust? This is
an issue that the sector needs to explore with greater awareness.

7. Conclusion
This chapter has provided an overview of the current digitization environment in the
cultural and heritage sectors. After a period of adoption and experimentation we are
now at a juncture where institutions are expected to provide digital versions of their
holdings, although there is much work to be done to create digital representations of
all that is deemed to be digitization-worthy. Digitization has been shown to be a
complex and costly process, in which the translation of analogue content into a digital
form is only a small part: much is dependent on the institutional framework,
resources, and aims in which the digitization project operates, rather than merely
considering technical issues about capture and storage. Best practice in newer areas
of digitization, such as 3D capture and printing, or the use of multi-spectral imaging,
is still being investigated, and it will continue to be the case that as new technologies
emerge their affordances should be explored for the particular use requirements of the
cultural and heritage sectors. In addition to technical aspects, there are pressing issues
regarding the use and usage of digitized resources, and how we can show that the
digitization process adds value to the user experience, and to society at large. We are
only just beginning to understand how institutions can best respond to a rapidly
changing information environment, and evolving user expectations – which may not
be combined with the same advances in digital literacy within our use communities.

Throughout this chapter, the importance of understanding institutional contexts and

aims has been shown to be paramount when planning, or considering undertaking, a
digitization project. Organizations must now take a more holistic view of the digital
environment in which they operate, to understand their users, their resources, and the
every growing potential inherent in the creation of digitized versions of historical and
culturally important content. A wealth of digitized heritage material has now been
created, with many more digital treasures to follow in the forthcoming decade.
Attempting to understand the possibilities this delivers across the sector, to a wide
range of users, is now part of the role of every individual digitization project, as we
look to a future where further advancements in digital capture, access, search,
analysis, and dissemination will affect how users interact with, perceive, and
understand their cultural inheritance.
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