II: Cultural Heritage

Are investments in the digital transformation of cultural heritage effective? A program evaluation approach

Introduction and literature review

Culture is becoming increasingly a precondition of all kinds of economic and social value generation, a process driven by two concurrent streams of innovation: digital content production and digital connectivity (ViMM, 2018). It is critical to Europe’s economy and society that the significance of digital cultural heritage is described and well understood, to ensure that this heritage benefits from necessary investment and sustained funding at the EU, national, regional, and local levels. Heritage organizations, particularly libraries, archives, and museums, are the keepers of most cultural and scientific content. They are generally non-profit organizations driven by goals related to providing access to collections in order to facilitate knowledge creation (Bakhshi & Throsby, 2012). Increasing and improving access to collections is an important driver for these organizations to adopt new technologies. Digitization and publication of collections online can potentially allow access to content across the globe and, as such, liberate this untapped knowledge potential (Borowiecki & Navarrete, 2017).

Since the 1990s, the European Commission has funded a number of projects to connect and give access to heritage materials in order to stimulate an innovative information society. Starting from the early 2000s, digitization of heritage collections became part of the key strategies that would contribute to the knowledge economy enabled by “unrestricted, sustainable and reliable digital access to Europe’s cultural and scientific knowledge” (OCW, 2004; Navarrete, 2014a: 163). In 2007, a specific complementary Competitiveness and Innovation Program (CIP) was established to fund the Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT-PSP). Most recently, the Horizon 2020 framework (running from 2014 to 2020) aims at creating a genuine single market for knowledge, research, and innovation.

All sectors benefit from the availability of creative content to innovate as content creation and diffusion fuel adoption of new ideas across all sectors, expanding beyond the creative industries (Lee 8c Rodriguez-Pose, 2014). It could be argued that a content-rich environment, fueled by collections held in heritage organizations, supports the formation of what Lee and Rodriguez-Pose (2014) refer to as genuine breeding grounds, key to creative cities and fundamental to drive soft innovation in all sectors.

To date, however, there is little known about the extent to which heritage organizations are able to innovate, or at least to adopt digital technology and increase access to collections. A previous qualitative analysis using an older data set and focused only on Dutch museums finds a slow growth of digital collections and their publication due to a national policy that, although it focuses on innovation, fails to support organizational change or skill development (Navarrete, 2014b).

In general, digitization is a loosely defined term which describes the set of management and technical processes and activities by which material is selected, processed, converted from analog to digital format, described, stored, preserved, and distributed. In this sense, digitization is an example of a supply-chain activity—one which generates an output (a product) based on a managed input (raw materials), which is distributed and transacted with an end-user (Barata, 2004; Yakel, 2004). In the European cultural heritage sector, digital transformation has come to signify various activities through which physical (analog) cultural content, such as books, artifacts, records, and other cultural material, is translated into a digital form, described, and made accessible through digital channels such as the Internet (Saracevic, 2000). Some critical distinctions concerning the use of this concept is required. Although digital transformation refers to similar processes in museums, archives, and libraries, the basic conceptual model differs in each domain. Hence, while digital transformation of published material in libraries is best characterized as a form of conversion or replacement (converting essentially the same material and content from one display/storage format to another without a significant loss of its cultural value, meaning or significance), in the case of museums and archives it is better characterized as surrogacy (the creation of a digital image and metadata which records and represents the original object, record or document; see e.g. Stroeker and Vogels [2014]). The distinction is important because conversion is mass-scale, reproducible, and broadly lossless in the sense that the information content of the original is not fundamentally lost in the process. Surrogacy, on the other hand, is less amenable to mass-production workflows because of the inherent complexity and variability of the material. It is, however, important not to regard too strictly the distinctions between digitization in museums, archives, and libraries (particularly in the case of national institutions), given that the nature of the material they are managing is frequently the same.

Digitization of library collections, largely comprised of books that can be scanned, has generally taken place within universities and national libraries. Digitization of books has had a specific trajectory after Google launched the mass digitization program in 2004, the Google Library Project, which accounts by now for over 15 million digital books (Benhamou,

A program evaluation approach 83

Table 6.1 Description of activities in the process of digitization

Source: Adapted from Tanner (2006, in: Poole, 2010, pp. 14-15).

2015). Another related initiative is the Open-Access Text Archive project launched by the Internet Archive in 2007, responsible for scanning over 2.1 million books and for giving online access to over six million full-text books (https://archive.org/).

As with any other manufacturing or supply process, can the process of digitization expand or contract to include a variety of activities, depending on the nature of the sector analyzed? To create a meaningful and consistent approach to this inquiry, the authors of MINERVA Digitization Cost Reduction Handbook (Tanner, 2006) have defined the scope of digitization as including the activities, described in Table 6.1.

This chapter aims to estimate the economic effects of government-level investments in the digital transformation of cultural heritage in Slovenia. To develop the analysis, the second section presents the three different datasets and methods used. The third section introduces the results and discusses our methodological choices, while the final section presents the discussion of the findings and concludes.