24 July 2024

The Value of Digital UK Collections

Commissioned Research

This Towards a National Collection webinar focuses on the value that people in the UK place on digital heritage collections, bringing together Rob Dutfield from Alma Economics and Claire Bailey-Ross from the University of Portsmouth:

Claire Bailey-Ross, University of Portsmouth: What researchers want: Understanding UK digital cultural heritage collections infrastructure through user-centred research
Rob Dutfield, Alma Economics: Placing a value on a UK digital collection research infrastructure

Towards a National Collection commissioned two pieces of research, exploring the Total Economic Value of UK digital collections for the general population and the value that research users place on access to digital collections. The findings of both investigations are launched at this webinar and published in our Zenodo Community as publicly available reports.

Full abstracts

Claire Bailey-Ross: What researchers want: Understanding UK digital cultural heritage collections infrastructure through user-centred research

This user consultation reveals the ways in which research users’ value and use existing cultural heritage digital collections and goes on to understand what motivations, priorities and needs they have for a future UK digital collections infrastructure. Key findings include the need for more digitised materials, robust digital preservation, improved search functionalities, enhanced metadata, interoperability, and sustainable practices.

Rob Dutfield: Placing a value on a UK digital collection research infrastructure

Alma Economics was commissioned by Towards a National Collection (TaNC) to estimate the Total Economic Value of a UK digital collection research infrastructure. Our analysis of questionnaires completed by over 8,000 individuals from the general population found an average willingness to pay (in terms of an increase in annual taxes) of around £8 per person to support the development, maintenance, and free accessibility of a unified digital collection of cultural heritage assets for the UK. By extrapolating this finding to the full UK adult population, we estimate a Total Economic Value for the service of around £425m per annum.