The ENUMERATE Self Assessment Tool: gain insight into your institution’s digital transformation

Use the Tool

Do you work in cultural heritage? Would you like a better understanding of your institution’s digital transformation, digitisation, organisational capacity, user engagement, audience development and collections reuse? Are you looking at digital tools to tackle the challenges of open access, social media presence, widening outreach, reaching diverse audiences and stimulating user participation? 

Then use the ENUMERATE Self Assessment Tool to receive insights and recommendations for resources based on the latest research. At the same time you’ll be helping to create a baseline for the current status of digital cultural heritage in Europe.

The Tool is embedded in the inDICEs Open Observatory in which you can discover a wealth of resources, guidance, discussions as well as discover networks and people to connect with. 

While the Self Assessment Tool is available to use at any time, your input and answers in the period between 25 May and 30 June 2022 will specifically be used to inform the ENUMERATE report in 2022. Follow the steps below to use the tool - through doing so, you will also help the sector to gain new insights and research into digitisation. 

1. Make an account or log in to the inDICEs Open Observatory, where you will find the ENUMERATE self assessment tool.

2. Navigate to the ENUMERATE self assessment tool process to read more. You can find the questions in various languages or download a spreadsheet of the questions and answers in the language tab.

3. If you are doing a full assessment of your institution, check the questions in advance and gather the information from colleagues, or sit down and fill in the questions together.

Why use the Tool? 

You benefit

The ENUMERATE Self Assessment Tool provides you with immediate resources and tips based on your responses. After filling out the questions, you will get a series of recommendations of helpful tools and resources based on your answers, for example, on how to create more impact for target audiences, how to develop a digital strategy or to support the digital transformation or capacity of your organisation. 

Once the ENUMERATE results have been analysed in summer 2022, the Self Assessment Tool will produce a benchmarking visualisation which can be viewed upon return to the platform. It will show you how your organisation’s results compare to others of a similar size, in a similar sector, or in the same country—information which you can use to support strategies, project proposals and reports. When circumstances change, you will also be able to submit a new response to the questions and track progress over time.

The sector benefits

Using the tool will also help Europeana, the European Commission and European policy-makers to gain important insights into the issues faced by the cultural sector in Europe and how organisations can best be supported. It helps to design sector-specific performance indicators and targets for the cultural heritage sector. The more responses we get, the more detailed an insight we have and, the better we can support you in the future. 

Hands-on help

In the coming weeks, Europeana will be hosting three ‘Cafés’ where we will introduce the Tool and can help answer your questions about completing the questions. Register for these events to be held on 9 June, 15 June and 23 June 2022.

We’ll help you navigate the Tool’s sections about: networks and audience; audience reach and participation; physical and digital collections; digitisation and digital strategy; standards; finances and staffing; and Europeana. If you have any questions about the Tool, you can also email enumerate@europeana.eu for support!

How the tool was developed

The ENUMERATE Self Assessment tool was developed by the inDICEs project, which began in January 2020. The project aims to uncover the impact of digital culture and digitisation in the cultural heritage sector and to address the need for innovative (re)use of cultural assets. It has gathered data on activities and impact that cultural heritage institutions were not already measuring, and over the last two years, has highlighted how crucial it is to introduce and support more data-driven decision making in the cultural heritage sector. The project issued important policy briefs and resources regarding cultural heritage value chains, open access policies and data monitoring. 

At the core of the Self Assessment Tool developed by the project is ENUMERATE, an initiative designed to create a reliable baseline of statistical data about digitisation, digital preservation, and online access to cultural heritage in Europe for policy-makers. The results of previous ENUMERATE surveys—fielded in 2011, 2014 and 2017—informed policy and strategic decisions into investment in digitisation throughout Europe, and provided valuable statistics on the status of digital in the cultural heritage sector for all those working in it to explore. The ENUMERATE Self Assessment Tool has been updated and enhanced with questions relating to social media, user participation and data monitoring practices, but also with suggestions of helpful resources for cultural heritage organisations.

This post was updated on 16/06/22 to update the deadline for answers being included in the ENUMERATE report from 24 June 2022 to 30 June 2022. 

This post was updated on 21/06/22 to add the information below:

The ENUMERATE Self Assessment Tool will ask you to provide personal information. We keep your personal information confidential. We will collect the data provided by you when signing up to answer the survey part of the tool and will keep it for a period of time in order to process and analyse the answers. We will not use your data for any activities not related to the survey. You can find out more about your rights and choices and how we use your information in our Privacy Policy.