Museum Digitization Practices Across Russia: Survey and Web Site Exploration Results

1. Introduction

An appeal to strengthen DH research using audiovisual collections has been repeatedly articulated in the DH community. Some of these collections are digitized museum collections of heritage objects. Many of these serve as repositories (sometimes for internal inventory purposes), some of the collections follow the rules of building digital scholarly editions and provide tools of analysis/summarizing and, sometimes, sources for critical interpretation.

Little is known, however about digitization practices within Museums in Russia, with no prior research into the number of Russian museum web sites, the amount of their collections digitized or put online or their digitization procedures. International research on digitization in museums has a comparatively long tradition and there is a significant literature on statistical data about digitization, digital preservation and online access to cultural heritage across Europe (ENUMERATE, 2015) and Northern America. Reports on digitization success stories in these geographical areas have been published (see among others ENUMERATE, 2015; Clough, 2013; Olsen, 2015) but there is no prior research regarding digitization uptake and practices in Russia.

This paper explores Russian museum digitization practices employing the standard method of surveying museums employed by the ENUMERATE project, allowing us to compare results to ENUMERATE. We also chose to augment our findings with the results from exploring the content of museum web sites to understand what parts of museum analogue collections are posted online. The paper seeks to answer a critical question about the size of digital collections as measured by the ratio of digital copies of unique museum objects to the number of unique objects from a museum collection (or the number of digital copies posted on the museum web site). We understand it very well that this can only serve as an imperfect proxy for digitization practices in Russian museums. However, in a situation when this is the only data that could be obtained, we judged it would be reasonable to start the discussion of digitization in Russian museums from this point.

2. Methods

In the early stages of our project we adapted the ENUMERATE questionnaire to our goals of obtaining answers from museum staff. We posted a survey with twelve questions online in October 2014 and we sent letters to 440 museums with a link to the survey. The email addresses were obtained from Museums of Russia web portal.¹ The database lists 3063 Russian museums including data on the number of visitors per year, the year when a museum was established and the number of curators among its employees. Our sampling method was to choose 130 museums located in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and 310 museums located in provincial cities and smaller settlements. Each of the 80 administrative districts in the Russian Federation was represented by 3-6 museums with one or two of them belonging to the group with the number of visitors per year more than 50,000 people. The other two groups included small museums (the number of visitors per year was fewer than 15,000 people) and medium museums with the number of visitors between 15,000 and 50,000 per year. This gave us an appropriate sample of museums to begin to understand different museum digitization practices across Russia.

Our next step was to study the web sites of large provincial museums and medium-sized provincial museums for 58 administrative districts (116 provincial museums as a total). Nineteen web sites for large museums and 23 web sites for medium-sized museums in Moscow and Saint Petersburg were also studied. The number of digital images on museum web sites was compared with the number of unique objects in their collections as reported in the Museums of Russia database (Museums of Russia, 2015).

3. Results and discussion

The response rate for the survey was a disappointing 6% (30 memory institutions completed the questionnaire and answered the most important question about the size of their digital collection). Such a response rate was very low compared to 30% response rate for the survey of library digitization projects in the USA in 2004 (Boock and Vondracek, 2006) and 51% for European cultural institutions in May 2007 and May 2009 (Poll, 2010). This result though is consistent with the finding that other Russian surveys tend to demonstrate low response rates with some studies reporting low level of trust to surveys among respondents (Kalinin, 2012), which has important methodological implications for those carrying out research within Russia.

In Table 1 we summarize the results for the survey of museum digital collections. Absolute average of the proportion of an analogue collection that was reported digitized for the 30 museums in the sample was 18,3%, in line with the results from ENUMERATE survey for 2012 (ENUMERATE, 2014).

Table 1. Distribution of parts of collection digitized (as reported by museums in our survey)

Tables 2, 3, 4, and 5 show the results for exploring the web sites of 158 Russian museums in the provinces and major cities to find out what parts of their analogue collections are posted online.

Table 2. Parts of museum analogue collections published online. Large provincial museums.

Table 3 Parts of museum analogue collections published online. Medium-sized provincial museums.

Table 4 Parts of museum analogue collections published online. Museums in Moscow and Saint Petersburg

Table 5 Parts of museum analogue collections published online. Overall results for 158 museums in the sample.

As shown in Table 5, a third of Russian museums in our sample publish less than 0,1% of their images online while another third of museums post digital images for a bigger part of their collection (but still less than 1%).

Large provincial museums are not enthusiastic about publishing their images online, with half of studied web sites demonstrating results which were lower than 0,1% of their analogue collections. Medium-sized museums show slightly better results, with a third of them displaying between 0,1 to 1% of their analogue collections online. They, however, have fewer objects to digitize and annotate. Museums in the two major cities seem more inclined to post their images online, with a quarter of museums publishing between 1% and 10% of their analogue collections on the Web.

4. Limitations

Unfortunately, the survey was designed so that respondents only had an opportunity to choose between 0% and 10% options when describing the parts of their analogue collections being digitized. This may have left many respondents with collections in between these figures indecisive on what option to choose, deteriorated the quality and accuracy of the results and may have influenced the response rate. The low response rate is also problematic, but, when combined with our survey of practice still gives us interesting insights to a hitherto undocumented area. Future work will be needed to work with museum bodies on gathering further data.

5. Conclusion

This work includes the survey results of thirty Russian museum digital collections to find out what part of their analogue collections is digitized. We also studied 158 museum web sites to count the number of digital images representing museum objects and to compare this number to the number of objects in the analogue collections. The average ratio of Russian museum digital collections in the sample of 30 museums compared to their analogue collections was 18,3% which is in line with the results from the ENUMERATE project (ENUMERATE, 2014), and aligns the work of Russian museums to the rate of digitization across Europe.

We have shown that half of large provincial museums in Russia publish an insignificant number of their images on the Web, and further work will allow us to establish why this is the case. Also (at a time when European Museums are being encouraged to adopt the Open Licensing Agenda), further work will pursue the opportunities of sharing digitized collections within Russian legislation.