"Digital transitions in the Cultural Heritage Sector"

Over the last twenty years, the cultural heritage sector has made an enormous effort to digitise their holdings and to adapt to the new digital reality. The growing collections of digitised and increasingly born-digital data have opened unprecedented opportunities for exploitation by creative industries, researchers, educators and individuals. Yet the economic and societal benefits of these activities are not immediately visible, especially due to the difficulty to measure them, thus failing to demonstrate the return on investment in digitisation and digital strategies for public engagement.

The inDICEs (External link) project aims to empower cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) to self-assess their readiness for the Digital Single Market (DSM) and their adaptation to the current legal frameworks in order to foster their digital transformation. In this context, inDICEs is working on providing in-depth research on the current legal framework and on the socio-economic impact of the activities of cultural institutions in the digital environment.

inDICEs is developing a novel methodology that will evaluate the wide-spread effects of this digital revolution and will guide its future evolution to further support the investment in digitisation and the creation of frameworks for accessible and reusable cultural assets. 

This methodology combines three strands of research:

• understanding and measuring the socioeconomic impact of access to cultural goods and services and of new modes of content production that have been enabled by digital cultural heritage;
• mapping IPR regulations on a national and international level to better understand legal constraints for creative reuse and identify areas where policies need to be aligned with practices to enable the promotion and exploitation of cultural assets;
• developing new business models and best practices that help individual organisations to overcome bottlenecks in the creative reuse and consumption of cultural assets.

Consultation Workshop with the Cultural Heritage Sector 

In order to collect input for the development of the research methodology, inDICEs is organising an online workshop with two sessions on 20-21 April 2021. The workshop brings together cultural heritage professionals, researchers and the inDICEs community to discuss needs and concerns in relation to digitization, online access, the use and the potential re-use of collections, data needed for developing digital strategies and contents, future research competencies and change management.