Survey Of Library And Museum Digitisation Projects

Resourceshelf.com has some highlights of research carried out by Primary Research into digitization projects carried out by libraries and museums in the United States.  Some stand-out stats of particular relevance to DAM include:

• The mean annual number of staff hours expended per institution on digitisation projects was 2,272 with a range of 0 to 24,000 (or about 12-13 full time employees spending all of their time on digitisation projects).
• Close to 54% of the organisations sampled have some form of digital asset management software and an additional 8.3% share a system with another department or division of their institution.
• 14.61% used the servers of some kind of third party service; this was most popular in the USA, where one sixth of respondents used a third party server service for digital content storage.
• 16.05% of organisations surveyed license or rent any aspect of their digital collection to any party.

The second figure implies that over 60% of museums and libraries in the US operate some kind of DAM system (whether for their sole use or shared).  It’s interesting to contrast this figure with the 50% of those surveyed in the CMSWire.com poll reported yesterday.

For those who are interested in digitisation and DAM for the preservation sector, the following is the abstract of the report provided by Primary Research:

“The nearly 200 page report looks closely at how academic, public and special libraries and museums are digitizing special and other collections. The study is based on detailed data on costs, equipment use, staffing, cataloging, marketing, licensing revenue and other facets of digitization projects from nearly 100 libraries and museums in the United States, the UK, continental Europe, Canada, and Australia. The study covers and presents data separately for digitizers of photographs, film and video, music and audio, text and re-digitization of existing digital mediums. Data is also broken out by budget size, region of the world, type of institution and other factors.  Data presented separately for academic libraries, public and government libraries, special libraries and museums.” [Read More]

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