For over a year, the Environmental Sustainability Practice Task Force has been surveying the GLAM sector to better understand environmentally sustainable practices across Europe. We are pleased to share the findings we have so far in our interim report, which has been conceived as a tool for collaborative co-creation and training with GLAMS across Europe. It aims to support digital heritage professionals by sharing experiences, ideas, and proposals for sustainable digitalisation processes, which we hope that they will be able to adopt in collaboration with their respective local communities.
The report analyses input from more than 100 respondents from 24 European countries and six countries worldwide. Through it, we attempt to develop a better understanding of the environmental impact produced by the digitisation process followed by the practitioners of the sector.
Our top three highlights
Our data analysis explores trends and practices of cultural heritage institutions that may allow them to use up less energy and material resources in all three stages of their digitalisation processes - from selecting what to digitally preserve, to their digital preservation practices to making content available and accessible to end-users. Three key insights have really caught our eye.
1. A lot of interest in environmental sustainability in digital preservation practices comes from individual professionals. When it comes to organisations, libraries are in the lead.
A striking percentage of 48.6% of the responses came from individuals, while 51.4% answered on behalf of their organisation. This percentage may reflect a lower level of awareness on the sustainability of digitalisation and integration in the organisational processes, and highlights the personal interest and knowledge of individual professionals.
When it comes to Organisations, libraries appear to lead the interest and action on the field, as 33.33% of respondents replied on behalf of this type of institution.
2. More than half of the respondent institutions include environmental sustainability in their strategies
It is good news that more than half of the respondents (50.65%) state that environmental sustainability is included in their organisational strategy somehow. This means that there is at least a first level familiarity with the concept, which could facilitate more actions in the future.
3. End-users’ accessibility seems high-priority, but inter-institutional interoperability gets more action
The main goal of most digitisation projects is to make digital assets widely available for public use, so accessibility and interaction of end-users is paramount. Most cultural heritage institutions who responded to the survey offer people the option to download digital material from their digital platform (74.14%). However, they tend to not offer people a choice in the type of file format they can download (55%) . This means that users can’t control the heaviness and energy demand for saving this material in their devices.
On an inter-institutional level, more than half of the respondents are engaged in some kind of activity to enrich the quality of their metadata and increase interoperability. This includes developing common standards or interlinking content via tagging, increasing energy and resource efficiency of the process.
Find out more
You can read the interim report in full to discover the detailed findings.
A final report with a complete analysis of the survey results will be published in the Autumn of 2024. Following this milestone, the Task Force will focus on widely sharing the knowledge and best-practices emerged from this exercise among institutions and professionals via a series of workshops.
If you are interested in this subject and would like to receive more information on how to contribute to and benefit from it, please contact Evangelia Paschalidou, Chair of the Environmental Sustainability Practice Task Force: evapaschal@gmail.com.
You can also join the Climate Action Community through the Europeana Network Association and get the latest sustainability-related news and actions in the digital cultural heritage field!
