Digital lifecycle cost study reaches climax

A project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to
investigate the costs of digital preservation has entered its most crucial phase.

The Life project, a joint venture between the British Library and University
College London, has developed a methodology to calculate the long-term
costs of preserving digital assets. It did this by analysing and comparing three
different digital collections and applying a lifecycle approach to each.

In the second phase of the project, due to be completed in August 2008,
the Life team will continue to refine its costing methodology and ask an
external economist to assess its validity.

A report on the first phase raised strategic issues about digital preservation.
These include the need for a wider collaborative approach between higher
education institutions and libraries to aid the cost-effective development of
tools and methods, and the creation of long-term partnerships between institutions
to address common requirements.

The report identified the lifecycle cost of digital objects in the first and 10th
years of existence. The lifecycle cost of a hand-held e-monograph, for example, is
£19 in the first year and £48 by year 10. “All strategic thinkers in an organisation
need to knowwhat digital preservation is going to cost,” said Neil Grindley,
programmemanager for digital preservation at JISC. “They can’t form a strategy
without some idea of how costly it is.The Life project is the most sustained
and serious attempt to assign costs to the lifecycle of digital objects.”

He added that the Life team had come up with a rigorous methodology
for determining the costs.

“It’s all to do with the entire lifecycle, what the extra costs are in terms of the
file formats you originally create, and what sort of metadata goes with those
files in order to characterise and explain the content of those files.”

The relentless pace of technological obsolescence makes the topic of digital
preservation an urgent one for libraries.

www.life.ac.uk

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