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Primary Research Group has published The Survey of Library &

Museum Digitization Projects, ISBN 157440-158-0.  

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.

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

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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

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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.

For further information view our website

at www.PrimaryResearch.com