In order to identify challenges that museums in Europe encounter when digitizing their collections and establishing online access to them, the Network of European Museum Organisation, NEMO, conducted a survey on digitization and copyright. The findings and recommendations have been gathered in a report, which was published on 15 July 2020.
The study was conducted analising three different target groups:
- national museum organisations,
- national ministries in charge of museums
- individual museums
It also debated the national implementation processes of the EU Digital Single Market Directive and arised questions about Intellectual Property Rights.
The results of this survey, in which participated 60 museums in 15 EU countries, were collected in a new report on digitisation and copyright where NEMO and its Working Group Digitalisation and IPR, provided recommendations to EU policy makers as well as to national museum organisations, to help museums on their way to digitalized collections.
The report concludes that:
- More than 80% of the responding museums claimed increased visibility as the main objective for digitizing their collections, closely followed by 75% of the museums who named increased access and educational use. More than 65% of the museums’ objective is to digitize their collection is providing metadata for researchers.
- 3 out of 4 museums report that their biggest obstacles regarding the digitization and online accessibility of the permanent collections are insufficient resources (money) and insufficient (time of) staff.
- Less than 20% of the collections of responding museums are available online. This means that less than half of the digitized objects are available to the public.
Read the highlights from the report here
Click here for the full report to get more findings and recommendations as well as detailed results from the survey.
