inDICEs: enhancing the impact of digital cultural heritage

Novel methodology to measure impact

The growing collections of digitised and increasingly born-digital data have opened unprecedented opportunities for exploitation by creative industries and individual citizens. Yet the economic and societal benefits of these activities are not always immediately obvious and fail to demonstrate the return on investment in digitisation and digital strategies for public engagement.

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

Our methodology combines three strands of research:

• understanding and measuring the socioeconomic impact of access to cultural goods and services and new modes of content production that have been enabled by digital cultural heritage;

• mapping Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regulations on a national and international level to 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 creative reuse and consumption of digital heritage.

An open observatory for the cultural heritage sector

While inDICEs is still in its first year, we have an ambitious goal to build an open observatory with three core elements:

Participatory space: a collaborative online environment for deliberation, co-creation and transparent dialogue between policy-makers, cultural heritage professionals, researchers and creative industry representatives. 

Visual analytics: inDICEs is currently performing large-scale analysis on various data concerning copyright policies and trends, user engagement with digital culture and more. To make sense of data, we will use narrative-based data visualisations that demonstrate patterns and links between access to digital heritage and its socioeconomic impact.

Self-assessment tool: individual CHIs will be able to assess the impact of their digital collections and identify changes to their business models that would help to increase it.

Consultation Workshop

In order to collect input for the development of our methodology, inDICEs is organising an interactive online workshop with two sessions on 15 and 16 September respectively. The aim of the workshop is to understand the needs and concerns of CHI professionals regarding Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and value chains, future research competencies and change management. Participants will have a chance to use our participatory space to actively join the discussion and share their knowledge and observations. You can find the full programme and register for the workshop here. Be quick as the number of spaces is limited!

Get involved!

Are you interested in our project outcomes? Join our community through the link below and receive the latest updates and opportunities to get involved in our Open Observatory co-design and testing processes.

For more information visit the inDICES website and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

inDICEs is funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.