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About this theme
All the institutions that we surveyed or spoke to said that their top reason for digitisation was access to their collections, with digital data increasing the potential for remote access; wider access, and new forms of access, in line with their overall mission or duty.
In the UK, many museums and cultural destinations are free to the public, and in keeping with this ethos almost three-quarters of institutions provide free access to their collection catalogues or digital assets. However, we also discovered that 1 in 5 institutions did not publish any digitised material. There were a variety of reasons behind this – not only lack of resource; but issues around sensitivity, skills, systems, and target audiences (for example, where material is only made available on request to researchers). This digitised but unpublished material represents a significant opportunity to enhance UK digital collections, if its release can be facilitated.
Yet despite this aspiration and potential, fewer than half the institutions surveyed have any digitisation policy or strategy. Digitisation is often more responsive than strategic, even within ongoing digitisation programmes in larger collections, and particularly where institutions are responding to project-based funding from funding bodies. This leaves a current landscape of digitised content that is fragmented and patchy, with strengths around certain themes, but also gaps. It was noted that in general there is less freely accessible 20th century material, due to copyright restrictions, and a lower representation of digitised non-Western content.
What could a strategic approach look like?
A single strategic approach to UK cultural heritage digitisation is unlikely to be feasible, or to be able fully to represent the diversity of collections, digitisation approaches and potential audiences. The group did consider a thematic gap analysis of collections currently digitised, but concluded that this would be premature as there is currently ‘more gap than content’, given the relatively low percentage of material digitised. In addition, there is currently no means to find out consistently what has already been digitised. With that in mind, the group were aware of and applauded initiatives such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded network led by University of Glasgow for a global dataset of digitised texts, and the British Library’s Global Register of Digitised Content.
Instead of a single, overarching strategy, therefore, the Taskforce explored the concept of strategic networks and Centres of Excellence, that could provide both a strategic overview function, a means of sharing best practice and supporting capabilities. Taskforce members such as The National Archives, British Film Institute, Natural History Museum and British Library already operate in many respects as centres of excellence, with subject-matter expertise in their collections and in related digitisation. This model could be extended if resources were available.
It is likely that these national Centres could form a matrix, taking into account subject matter; technology provision (for example, shared services or expertise in digital storage and preservation); and geographic coverage. A national hub might, for instance, work with regional museums and archives or with related sectors such as Higher Education to reach more local collections. It might train others and share best practice, or actively provide digitisation equipment and services, depending on resources and needs.
Recommendations
Recommendation 1:
National or larger collections-holding institutions should be supported to act, formally or informally, as Centres of Excellence to share best practice, skills and equipment with others in the sector.
The Digitisation Network will:
● Continue to act as a focal point and knowledge-sharing network around the subject of cultural heritage digitisation.
● Encourage members to act as Centres of Excellence in their own particular disciplines and communities.
Recommendation 2:
Funders, infrastructure initiatives, higher education and strategic partners should consider resource to develop and sustain Digital Centres of Excellence.
The Digitisation Network will:
● Bring new innovation partners and non-government funders to the table.
Wellcome Collection
Case Study : Wellcome Collection digitisation
Wellcome Collection is Wellcome’s free museum and library. Our goal is to challenge how we think and feel about health by connecting medicine, health and art.
To further our aim to increase engagement with our collections for as wide and diverse a group of people as possible we have, to date, digitised and made freely available nearly 300,000 items, comprising 43 million images.
Although technology and systems greatly help us optimise our workflows, our success in managing large-scale digitisation is largely down to the team. We subscribe to the “self-organising” principle of team management. Within a framework of collaborative quarterly objective-setting and clarity on constraints, teams can experiment with different approaches to how they work.
Digitisation in process at Wellcome Collection, by Thomas S.G. Farnetti, Wellcome Collection, CC-BY
We treat our digitisation efforts as “pipelines” rather than discrete projects. A pipeline consists of a continuous workflow focused on specific formats or content types. This continuity helps us make efficient use of staff availability and expertise, equipment, contractual relationships, space, etc. The team is encouraged to innovate with continuous improvement as a key performance indicator.
We’ve automated our ingest workflows using open source digitisation workflow systems. Automation reduces unnecessary manual labour and improves workflow management, increasing the number of items we can handle at any given time.
Storage and system scalability are a serious consideration when digitising at scale. We have moved all our digital assets and workflow systems from local servers to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and have found this to be cost-effective, more robust and allows us to provide standards-based services such as BagIt for file fixity, development of open source services, and replication to multiple locations.
We have realised major benefits from transforming our ways of working. The key has been directing our focus on developing cross-functional teams that are empowered to organise and act, working across flexible pipelines of work, and the integration and development of open source software as part of our drive to automate and transition to Cloud storage.
The National Archives
Case Study: Plugged In, Powered Up
In 2019, The National Archives launched a strategy and range of programmes designed to build capacity in the archives sector. This focuses on improving digital engagement, access and content preservation by the sector but this is underpinned by broader work on underlying digital skills.
Our wide-ranging 2019 survey carried out with Jisc revealed wide disparities in technical skill and capacity between organisations and within them. This means that the programmes needed to cover multiple topics, be pitched at different skill levels and be suitable for different types and sizes of organisation.
The programmes developed fall on a spectrum, from less structured sharing of best practice through meetings of the Digital Archives Learning Exchange (DALE) and peer mentoring of inexperienced digital practitioners by more experienced colleagues elsewhere in the sector; to structured digital preservation training delivered in person at Kew (‘Archives School’) or online (‘Novice to Ninja’, developed with the Digital Preservation Coalition). More formal educational models also form part of the programme with a PGCert in Computing for Cultural Heritage being piloted with the British Library and Birkbeck, University of London and the continuation of The National Archives ‘Bridging the Digital Gap’ program to bring trainees with non-traditional and technical backgrounds into archives.
No single intervention from these strands would be sufficient to meet the sector’s significant need but evaluating them will help show which interventions are most appropriate for organisations with low to high digital capacity and low to high capacity in general. The objective is to bring good practice into many different parts of the sector at once.