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1. Introduction
Archives, libraries and museums are the main institutions that collect and preserve the cultural heritage of a country. For decades, they have been trying to convert their large "analogue" collections into digital format. Their main purpose for this is to facilitate access to the collections for the various potential user groups, e.g. researchers, teachers, or the general public. A second objective of digitisation aims at preserving the original of an item without restricting access to it.
Most digitisation activities concentrate on the national cultural heritage. This includes texts, pictures, and sound, but also artefacts or natural objects. Though digitisation activities are manifold, often supported by national or regional funding programmes, it is nearly impossible to get reliable data about what has been achieved. Statistics of digitisation are in most cases only collected in the individual institution or within a funding programme, but not on a larger scale. The data that are collected and the collecting methods differ considerably between regions, countries and types of institutions. Therefore, even if data exist, they cannot be grossed up for a national overview, and comparison between institutions or countries will not be possible.
This unsatisfactory situation gave the reason for a European Commission project that aimed at finding measures for digitisation activities that could be used for a European overview and that might also be permanently used in European cultural institutions: the project was called NUMERIC and its web site is at www.numeric.ws
2. The project NUMERIC
As a European Commission project, NUMERIC addressed the digitisation issues in European countries, and especially the digitisation of the national cultural heritage. Its goal was to define and test measures and methods for assessing and describing the current state of digitisation in Europe's cultural institutions. This included the issue of financial input into digitisation as well as the digitised output.
The questions that NUMERIC had to answer look simple at first sight. Governments, foundations and other funding institutions yearly spend considerable sums on digitisation projects. What those stakeholders and also the general public want to know is:
What has been done in digitisation until now?
What did that cost?
What remains to be done?
What will that cost?
In order to answer these questions, the following facts have to...