This is Digital Humanities 2016 (Krakow, Poland) conference paper and its aim is to learn more about digitization in Russia.

1. Museum Digitization Practices Across Russia:
Survey and Web Site Exploration Results
Inna Kizhner
Lecturer
Dept of IT in Creative
and Cultural Industries
Siberian Federal University
inna.kizhner@gmail.com
Melissa Terras
Professor of Digital Humanities,
UCL Dept of Information Studies
Director
UCL Centre for Digital Humanities
University College London
m.terras@ucl.ac.uk
Maxim Rumyantsev
Associate Professor
Dept of IT in Creative
and Cultural Industries
Vice-Rector (Academic Affairs)
Siberian Federal University
m-rumyantsev@yandex.ru

2. The aim of this paper is to learn more about digitization
in Russia, which no-one has looked at previously on
a national scale.

3. We are aware of the existence of at least 3000 Russian
museums from the Hermitage Museum in Saint
Petersburg to smaller museums in provinces.

6. Image quality can be relatively high or quite low.

9. The data on digitization in Russian museums is currently
collected formally via several projects conducted by the
RF Ministry of Culture.
The first project is the National Catalogue of the RF
Museum Objects.
4 July 2016: 2,369,180 records, 954,256 images.

11. Statistics collected by the RF Ministry of Culture:
(Krasnoyarsk Region, 49 museums out of 3063).
• 965,538 museum objects,
• 46 web sites,
• 591,125 database records,
• 154,853 digital images,
• 15,127 images online.
Percentage of digitized images: 16%,
percentage of digitized images online: 1,6%

13. Survey
We used the Museums of Russia portal to collect data about
museums and select a sample of large, mid-sized and small museums.

14. Results: 6% response rate, the percentage of
digitized images was reported to be 18% in 2014
(the year of the survey).

15. Second stage
Web Site Exploration of online access to cultural heritage
for Russian museums.

16. % of digital images
representing museum
collections online
number of museums as % of museums in
the sample
0 27 17
from 0 to 0,1 48 30
from 0,1 to 0,98 50 31
from 1 to 10 26 16
more than 10 7 4
Parts of museum analogue collections published online.
Overall results for 158 museums in the sample.

17. A third of Russian museums in our sample publish less
than 0,1% of their images online while another third
of museums post digital images for a bigger part of their
collection (but still less than 1%).

18. The data from the survey seems to be in line with
statistical data for Krasnoyarsk region for 2015,
while the data from web site exploration seems
to contradict statistics.

19. Further research is needed to make generalizations but
in general the percentage of digitized images obtained
from the survey (18%) and regional statistical data (16%)
is comparable with the Enumerate data for 2015 (23%)
and almost equal to the Enumerate data for 2013 (17%).

20. The data for the percentage of digital collections online
for the Enumerate (3%) are twice higher than our results
(1,6% for regional statistics and less than 1% for 80%
museums in our sample).

21. Even so Russian cultural heritage seems to be a rich
source of visual data for humanities research.
Digitization and online access are the essential stages on
the way to arranging meaningful patterns in Russian
cultural heritage.