The document summarizes an ENUMERATE workshop discussing the purpose and findings of the ENUMERATE Thematic Network. Some key findings from the ENUMERATE surveys included a disparity between digitization strategies and action among cultural heritage institutions in Europe, with around 20% of collections digitized so far. The network achieved its objectives of building a community of practice, developing a valid survey methodology, conducting coordinated surveys, and creating an open data platform for digitization intelligence. Going forward, the network aims to sustain its efforts by embedding the methodology in ongoing national and European data gathering initiatives.

1. MSEG ENUMERATE Workshop
Nick Poole, CEO, Collections Trust

2. • Introduce the purpose of the ENUMERATE Thematic Network
• Review the key findings of the ENUMERATE surveys
• Answer your questions & benefit from your insights
• Plans for the future & key lessons learned
Aims for today

4. • The State Library in Vienna is digitising its entire collection
• Having this material in digital form enables them to serve 1000s of
researchers & members of the public every week
• The library could not resource physical access at this scale & to do so
would risk permanently damaging the collection, denying access for
future generations
• Making the commitment to access in digital form has opened up both
new partnership opportunities and new ideas inspired by their
collections, making them more relevant & helping deliver their core
mission in a connected age
Context

5. A defining challenge
• The digitisation, digital preservation and
provision of meaningful access to
Europe’s vast treasures of cultural
heritage is one of the defining challenges
for our generation. It is the fuel which will
help power smart, sustainable growth,
founded in the Enlightenment ideals that
created the European Union.

6. Why ENUMERATE?
• Digitisation, long-term preservation and provision
of online access to Europe’s cultural heritage
presents an immense challenge
• Meeting this challenge depends on effective
decision-making & prioritisation at institutional,
Member State & European level
• Good decisions depend on current, accurate and
relevant contextual information
• The provision of this information is the aim of
ENUMERATE

9. What kind of process is Digitisation?
• Digitisation is an industrial-scale process that
happens through a combination of core
management and additional directed activity
• As such ‘digitisation’ cannot easily be separated
as a distinct entity from the other activities of
the institution
• Although there are digitisation projects,
digitisation itself is not a project
• The efficiency, impact & sustainability of this
process is highly context-sensitive & different in
different sectors

10. One size does not fit all
• “Digitisation” means different things in different sectors:
• In the AV & film community, digitisation is an urgent challenge of
conversion from unstable formats
• In the library community, success equates to mass-digitisation,
distributed access and discovery
• In the museum community, success is about boutique digitisation,
curated content & end-user experiences
• In the archive community, success tends to be about management,
preservation, discovery and connection

11. Who are the ENUMERATE Thematic
Network?

13. A European network of expertise
ENUMERATE Consortium
(10 Project Partners)
Core Group
(DEN,
DIGIBIS, CT,
SPK)
National
Coordinator
Project
Manager
(CT)
Member
States'
Expert Group
(MSEG) on
Digitisation
and Digital
Preservation
Advisory
Group
(Invited
participants)
Coordinator
(CT)
National
Coordinator
National
Coordinator
National
Coordinator

14. Our role as Coordinator
• Ensuring that the ENUMERATE project was managed in accordance
with the formal project management framework;
• Ensuring that deliverables were delivered on time and within scope
• Ownership of the overall project timeline and ensuring that activities
were coordinated and dependencies met;
• Ownership of the change management process, and creation of
necessary support tools and mechanisms.

15. The Core Group
• Meeting the objectives;
• Carrying out the tasks;
• Authoring the deliverables;
• Passing the milestones;
• Ensuring the quality of the work.

16. The Advisory Group
• Reviewing proposals for the ENUMERATE core and thematic
survey methodology;
• Making recommendations to promote engagement in
ENUMERATE by the stakeholder communities;
• Providing technical and other specific expertise to ensure a valid
outcome from ENUMERATE;
• Contributing to project deliverables

17. National Coordinators
• Personal and organisational commitment to the project;
• Representation of their National community;
• Provision of resources, contacts and perspective;
• Contribution to the development and rollout of the survey;
• Translation, localisation and analysis.
On behalf of the whole consortium, we would like to thank the National
Coordinators, without whom the success of the project could not have
been achieved

18. Who participated?

19. Participation by organisation type

20. Participating countries
+ important contributions from Cyprus, Monaco & Lichtenstein

21. What were the original objectives of the
ENUMERATE Thematic Network?

22. Objectives for ENUMERATE
Objective 1:
The development of a vibrant and sustainable European community of
practice, connecting practitioners in statistical analysis and digital
content creation and preservation and supporting the sharing of
knowledge and best practices
Objective 2:
The creation, promotion and development of a statistically-valid open
methodology for surveying the digitisation, use, preservation and
associated costs of cultural heritage materials in Member States

23. Objectives for ENUMERATE
Objective 3:
The implementation of a multi-annual programme of coordinated
surveys based on this methodology, including wide-scale harmonised
statistical data-gathering and more in-depth and analytical surveying of
digitisation activities by European cultural heritage institutions
Objective 4:
The creation and maintenance of an open, sustainable data platform to
collate, analyse and promote the use of normalised data and
intelligence arising from these surveys

24. What did we do to achieve these
objectives?

25. Key activities
• Project began Feb 2011
• Project identity established March 2011
• Survey Methodology delivered December 2011
• First ENUMERATE Core Survey January – March 2012
• Launch of ENUMERATE Data Platform June 2012
• Launch of ‘Thematic’ Survey December 2012
• Second ENUMERATE Core Survey June - September 2013
• Reporting of responses December 2013
• Planning future development January 2014

26. What has the ENUMERATE Thematic
Network delivered so far?

27. Conceptual Framework
• A conceptual model of how
digitisation activities can be
quantified and measured in cultural
heritage institutions

28. Survey Reports (2012 & 2013)
• Two comprehensive survey reports
detailing the findings, analysing the
data and uncovering trends

29. Executive Summaries
• 4 Stakeholder Reports summarising
the key findings, highlighting national
activities and presenting the data

30. Communications
• Wide-scale engagement with the
professional community through
social media, newsletters, email and
other networks

31. Data Platform
• An innovative, open platform through
which the data can be accessed,
interrogated and used, including a
dashboard to facilitate visualisation

32. Survey sample
• An approach to sampling cultural
heritage organisations across Europe
to ensure a reasonable coverage of
institution types & scales

33. Multilingual survey
• Thanks to our National Coordinators,
survey questionnaires were available
in:
• Czech
• Dutch
• English
• Estonian
• French
• Hungarian
• Lithuanian
• Polish
• Slovenian
• Spanish

34. Lots and lots of data!
• ENUMERATE was successful in
generating raw data about digitisation
activities across 1951 European
institutions

35. What did we already know? Some
baseline figures...

36. NUMERIC & SIG Stats
• Predecessor project
‘NUMERIC’ provided core
elements of methodology
• Special Interest Group on
Statistics formed the core
ENUMERATE consortium

37. Digitisation Costs Study
• Estimated number of books to be digitised between 59 – 95m (compared to
Google Books estimate of a total of 135m titles in existence)
• An estimated 7m rare books, periodicals and incunabula to be digitised
• Estimated 265m man-made artefacts and 221m natural artefacts in museums
(with a very significant margin of error!)
• More than 350m photographs in museums & archive collections
• Approximately 700,000 units of microfilm in library & archive collections

38. What were the key findings of
ENUMERATE?

39. Disparity between strategy & action

40. An ongoing process

41. A huge variety of collection types

42. An emerging openness

43. A preservation challenge

44. An economic puzzle

45. Key figures (core survey 1)
• c83% of cultural heritage institutions have a digital collection;
• c20% 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;
• c34% of institutions have a digitisation strategy;
• c85% 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.

46. Key figures (core survey 2)
• 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.

47. What did we achieve, what is the impact
and what did we learn?

48. Achievements: Community
• Providing continuity of effort with previous networks/SIG
• Creating a vibrant network across Europe
• Securing participation from 27 Member States & MSEG
• A huge voluntary contribution of time and effort
• Effective engagement with European/sector-wide initiatives
• A strong identity and good brand-recognition
• Excellent knowledge exchange

49. Achievements: Process
• Creating & refining a viable methodology
• Building on past achievements/survey activity
• Achieving consensus on standards & definitions (normalisation)
• Delivering a solid body of multi-lingual survey activity
• Providing full documentation of methodology & rationale
• A significant advance in the state-of-the-art & a good foundation for
future efforts

50. Achievements: Intelligence
• A body of evidence highlighting key strategic challenges and
opportunities in digitisation
• An open data platform, providing strategic sector intelligence for
public & private sector use
• A corpus of professional analysis and insight into the digital
transformation of Europe’s cultural heritage sector
• Connection to long-term, coordinated evidence-gathering at
European, Member State and institutional levels
• Improved, current data about European cultural institutions

51. Objectives
• Community of practice 
• Valid open methodology 
• Coordinated surveys 
• Data and intelligence 
ENUMERATE has achieved significant advances in the field – where
previously activity was diffuse and fragmented, our future
efforts can now be built on a foundation of best practice, tried-
and-tested methods, standards and definitions

52. What didn‘t go so well?
• Cannot claim statistical validity on the basis of the sample from the 2
ENUMERATE Core Surveys
• There is no single, authoritative way to measure digitisation activity
across all domains
• Concerns about validity of findings relating to AV material (partly as a
result of non-participation by AV community)
• ‘In-depth’ survey activity hampered by lack of resources

53. Lessons learned
• Critical success factors include:
• Existing policy environment
• Strategic commitment by organisations & agencies
• Individual personal commitment
• Structure of the sector in each Member State
• Consistency of personnel in institutions
• Continuity of previous efforts (NUMERIC, SIG STATS)
• Embedding into existing frameworks for reporting
• Longitudinal data-gathering and analysis

54. Impacts
• At a European level, ENUMERATE has impacted on policy (MSEG) and
delivery (Europeana v3)
• At a National level, ENUMERATE has informed national policies &
funding programmes (for example in the Netherlands and UK)
• At an institutional level, ENUMERATE has encouraged organisations to
revisit their policies for digitisation & preservation
• At a professional level, ENUMERATE has promoted collaboration,
knowledge-sharing & networking between experts

55. How does this relate to other initiatives?

56. European Statistical surveys
• EGMUS
• Conference of European National Librarians (CENL):
• European Association for Library & Information Education and Research (EUCLID)
• European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA)
• European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA)
• European Confederation of Conservator-restorers' Organisations (ECCO)
• Europa Nostra – pan-European Federation for Cultural Heritage
• The EUROPEAN FORUM of HERITAGE ASSOCIATIONS
• European Network of Cultural Centres/Historic Monuments (ACCR)
• ICOM-Europe – International Council of Museums Europe Alliance
• NEMO - The Network of European Museum Organisations

57. Interaction outside Europe
• Institute for Museum at Library Services (Washington)
• Smithsonian (Washington)
• Instituto Brasileiro de Museus (IBRAM, Brasilia)
• Board of Museum Computer Network (United States)
• ISO TC46 SC8 (Quality - Statistics and performance evaluation)
• WG11 International museum statistics

58. National Registration/surveying
• A key component of our future success lies in securing the integration
of the ENUMERATE core methodology into National statistical work
• We need to liaise with National Coordinators to understand and
improve our modelling of national statistical efforts & how they can
connect up into an overall European picture

59. Private sector market analysis
• Survey data had been requested for download 30 times as at
February 2014
• 7 Universities requested the full data for research projects
• 3 private companies including Boston Consulting Group requested
access to the full data
• Engagement with the Google Cultural Institute and digitisation project
to share further insights and intelligence

60. Where do we go from here?

61. Critical Success Factors
• Digitisation is a long-term transition for Europe’s cultural heritage
sector
• Effective monitoring & strategic intelligence depends on
longitudinal analysis
• We need to embed this as an ongoing data-gathering process:
• At European level (eg. in bi-annual reporting to MSEG)
• At Member State level (eg. in annual Registration processes)
• At Institutional level (eg. in Performance Indicators/reports)

62. Europeana v3!
• Digitaal Erfgoed Nederlands (DEN) and the Collections Trust have
joined the consortium for Europeana version 3
• Bringing the ENUMERATE methodology to bear on providing
statistical data for Europeana’s planning and development as a core
service platform
• At least one more year of survey activity
• A channel to promote and disseminate the findings

65. ENUMERATE Partnership Agreement
• We are committed to sustaining the effort and impact of ENUMERATE to
inform future work
• The purpose of this Agreement is to set out a framework of agreed actions
and activities to support:
• Ongoing access to the data and documentation developed by the EC-
funded ENUMERATE Thematic Network;
• Networking and knowledge-sharing activities to promote the future
development of the ENUMERATE methodology;
• Collaboration to embed the ENUMERATE methodology and Conceptual
Framework into institutional, National and European data-gathering
initiatives on Digitisation.

66. ENUMERATE Partnership Agreement
• Participants commit to:
• Promote awareness of ENUMERATE and its findings
• Promote the findings of the ENUMERATE Thematic Network
• Meet annually to review progress and to identify opportunities for
further development;
• Encourage the embedding of the ENUMERATE methodology and
national data-gathering efforts
• Develop key messages and policy recommendations to inform decision-
making by the European Commission;
• Work to identify future opportunities to build on ENUMERATE

67. We need you!
• Sign up to the Partnership Agreement
• Promote awareness of ENUMERATE in your community
• Where possible, embed the methodology in your national statistical work
• Encourage your communities to participate in the work for Europeana v3
• Tell us your ideas!

68. Thank you!
nick@collectionstrust.org.uk
@NickPoole1