Monday, December 13, 2010

Report: The Survey of Library and Museum Digitization Projects, 2011 Edition

I received an email about this report -- The Survey of Library and Museum Digitization Projects, 2011 Edition -- and thought it was worth mentioning. I don't know anything about it, except what is below.

ABSTRACT: 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.

COST: $89.00 print or PDF; $189.00 for a multi-site license

James Moses, Research Director for the Primary Research Group, has circulated the information below about the report on the Digital-Preservation discussion list:

Just a few of the study’s many findings are that:
  • Digitizers whose primary medium was music and audio spent 56.25% of their total digitization staff time on cataloging and metadata related issues.
  • Digitization budgets come largely through non-budgetary allocations. The library or museum annual budget accounted for only a little over 35% of the overall digitization budget.  
  • Prospects for digitization funding in the United States were much better than prospects outside of the USA; about 28.6% of US survey participants considered the outlook pretty good or excellent while only 5.88% of those from other countries shared this optimism.
  • The mean annual number of staff hours expended per institution on digitization 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 digitization projects).
  • Only 3.45% of institutions sampled have outsourced rights, permissions or copyright management to any third party.
  • Overall survey participants say that over the past three years they have outsourced close to 27% of their overall digitization work.  
  • Close to 54% of the organizations 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 organizations surveyed license or rent any aspect of their digital collection to any party.
  • Data is also broken out by budget size, region, type of institution, and other factors.

1 comment:

Micah Vandegrift said...

This will be really useful for me, as we are in the beginning stages of a digitization project between the Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Museum and Brooklyn Historical Society. Thanks for posting.