Financial Sustainability of Digitizing Cultural Heritage: The International Platform Europeana

Abstract

In recent years, the increasing demand for digital cultural content has intensified the digitization challenges for cultural organizations. Among these difficulties, cultural organizations have been struggling to find the financial resources for digitizing their cultural heritage, as well as for storing data, developing digital skills, and implementing enhancement and management processes for their digitized materials. The financial sustainability of digitization projects has therefore been problematic, especially for small and medium organizations. In this framework, among its attempts to solve these issues, the European Union has launched the project Europeana, a digital platform uniting European digitized heritage and empowering cultural organizations through a variety of services. The aim of our research was to investigate the Europeana project to understand how it eases the financial costs of digitization for cultural organizations, and how the Europeana model could bring insights into how to improve the financial sustainability of digitization of cultural heritage.