Preservation and archiving of digital resources is a major challenge for all organisations. The University College London and the British Library have undertaken some interesting research on the cost of preserving particular kinds of digital resources in a project called LIFE. The project has formulated a way of calculating the costs of the digital lifecycle of a resource for the next 5,10 or 100 years.
When digitising projects budgets are developed, often the costing is based on the cost of digitisation, establishment and hosting of the repository, (perhaps) metadata creation and management and ingest of the records. Frequently the ongoing costs of preservation/maintenance of the digital assets over time are not incorporated in the overall thinking about the project. That is, eventually the project becomes a service rather than a project with start/finish dates.
The LIFE report finds that the costs of preserving a single digital resource in the first year (depending on the kind of resource - and the kinds covered in the report are limited in scope) is between 15 GBP and 206 GBP ($AUD34.50 - $AUD474) to 8 GBP - 3,000 GBP ($AUD18 - 6,904) in the fifth year.
For anyone in the process of implementing a digital repository, these costs bear factoring in to the business plan for the service.
Read the full report (PDF) or the Summary Report (PDF).
To balance the business case, of course the value of preservation for the particular organisation or community needs to be considered. This may not necessarily be a $ value, but may be measured in terms of social benefit.
The edna project, managed by education.au on behalf of the project stakeholders, was evaluated a few years ago, and the concept of social benefit was particularly important in that case. To undertake the evaluation, a modified version of an AGIMO-developed methodology was used. This methodology - Demand and Value Assessment - enabled social benefit factors to be included in considering the overall value of the project to its stakeholders.
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