The Numeric Study aimed to measure the progress of the digitisation of Europe’s cultural heritage

One of Europe’s key Information Society policy objectives is to make the content and digitally preserved materials of archives, museums and libraries more widely available. Across Europe these institutions are converting their ‘analogue’ collections into digital form thereby creating new opportunities for all interests to benefit from improved and convenient access to these resources. NUMERIC is a European Commission project that defines the empirical measures for digitisation activities and establishes the current investment in digitisation and the progress being made by Europe’s cultural institutions.

CIPFA were commissioned to undertake a study that tested a framework for collecting and analysing data relating to digitisation activities of materials held by libraries, archives and museums in the EU and implemented this with the help of nominated experts in each European Country. The deriving measures relate to the costs to the institutions concerned, and the progress made towards both preserving and making their materials accessible on-line. Such statistics are required to:

• better identify the total European digitisation effort and progress;
• make international comparisons, between countries in the EU and EFTA, the United States of America, Canada, Australia, China and India;
• stimulate further digitisation by demonstrating the current progress;
• better inform stakeholders that have an interest or direct involvement in digitisation policies and funding (governments, statistical agencies, cultural institutions, academic and scientific institutions, publishers, industry).

The Executive Summary of the final Numeric report can be downloaded from the following link

The final Numeric report can be downloaded from the following European Commission website