UNESCO Roadmap for Long Term Access to Digital Heritage

Focus on the economic factors and the cost of digital preservation

Neil GrindleyProgramme Manager&4C Project Coordinator

Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

1. Use some of the work that the 4C Project is doing to examine emerging issues and make recommendations

2. Set out where economic issues seem to overlap most significantly with the issues and ideas set out in the Vancouver declaration and the Roadmap position paper and highlight some relevant areas of existing or emerging work ... and (hopefully) suggest some topics for discussion

• Understanding the cost of preservation may mean we can offer realistic and cost effective curation services to others.

• Understanding costs can support strategic planning.

• Understanding costs can support tactical decision-making.

• Understanding costs can provide evidence of cost-effectiveness and value.

• Clarifying and publishing the cost of digital curation can be used to enhance an organisation’s credibility. But this must be done along with the context of how the costs were calculated

• Understanding economic drivers can help to strategically align an organisation

Why is it a good idea to try and work out the costs of digital preservation?

4C Project Deliverable ...Evaluation of Cost Models and Needs & Gaps Analysis (based on stakeholder consultation)• cost models should support accounting, but more importantly they should enable

budgeting• they should be able to handle various types and amounts of assets and use cases• they should have a sound definition and breakdown of costs and enable modelling

of cost variables• easy to use tools, preferably with default settings, should support the models• there is a clear need to assess the benefits and value of digital curation

The most important gaps we discovered were:• poor usability• lack of consensus on how to define, qualify and structure cost data• lack of representation of the benefits of investing in digital curation

Recommendations for action include:

• provision of a high-level quick entry guide to all existing models that describes the scope and structure of the models indicating their relevance for different stakeholders and use cases

• provision of a standard vocabulary and conceptual description of cost benefit models

• provision of a common cost benefit model that can be adjusted to specific use cases

• provision of clearly designed and user-friendly tools with default reference settings that can be fine-tuned to accommodate for various stakeholder needs, and usable user-interfaces

• provision of benefit modules in addition to the cost models

Indirect Economic Determinants

authenticitybenefitefficiencyimpactinnovationinteroperabilityqualityreputationrisksensitivityskillssustainabilitytransparencytrustworthiness value

Economic Sustainability Reference Model

(Brian Lavoie & Chris Rusbridge)

http://4cproject.eu/

The Curation Costs Exchange (CCEx)

€...‘a functional framework and platform for the exchange of curation costs-related information’.

Issues declared in the UNESCO Vancouver Declaration & the Digital Roadmap Position Paper that have specific & significant economic implications

Development Public-private Partnerships

Risk & ThreatsOpen Data & Open

Government

Education & Training

Skills Acquisition

Establishing Infrastructure

Development

Some issues ...• Authenticity of information and keeping things honest• Making diverse content widely available and keeping it accessible• Having appropriate expectations about the availability of

equipment, infrastructure and skills

Some challenges ...• Fragile, uncertain economies and low incomes• Vulnerability to natural disasters and social upheaval

How might digital preservation help ...?• Distributed Digital Preservation Networks (DDP’s)

o Keeps content locally (or can fetch it again from a distributed location)

o Will automatically check and fix broken contento Can support a range of governance modelso Can be achieved with a relatively small investment

Public-private Partnerships

There is scope for a great deal more creativity between different types of organisations. Transparency around cost will help ...

Public-private Partnerships

There is scope for a great deal more creativity between different types of organisations. Transparency around costs will help ...

Education & Training

Skills Acquisition

The challenge for educators is to turn out graduates with the right knowledge and skills to do the types of work that actually need to be undertaken in the work place.

The challenge for trainers is to design and deliver precisely the right level of course, for the right audience, in the right format

Practitioners need chances to be exposed to other practitioners and to acquire new skills in a creative and supportive peer environment.

SPRUCE Projecthttp://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SPR/Home

Establishing Infrastructure

We need to recognise what we already have in order to cost-effectively make our infrastructure more effective.

www.thekeepers.org

http://coptr.digipres.org/Main_Page

http://netpreserve.org/

And keep abreast of initiatives that are emerging ...

Virtual Centre of Excellence (VCoE)

The NSLA Technical Registry

Open Data & Open Government

Some of the more contentious issues around ‘openness’ involve economic perspectives.

Publishing has changed irrevocably and new competitive advantages for businesses must be developed by careful identification of (and creative responses to) emerging customer demand

Research and data that is publicly funded (scientific or governmental) must logically be made freely available to those who have provided the funding. It is then up to researchers and businesses to exploit the openness of that data in the most creative and effective way possible.

It starts simple – it becomes complicated ...!

Continued investment is required in Web Archiving and supporting people to ensure their data is ‘preservable’

Risk & Threats

There is a very large body of literature on the topic of risk and risk management and the digital preservation community has developedsome tools and approaches.

• Risk identification• Risk analysis• Risk evaluation• Treatment of risk

We must make sufficient investment into systems and processes so that we trust them to withstand threats and to effectively mitigate the risks we identify.

A more sure-footed and decisive approach to digital preservation will foster additional positive mindsets ...

• More emphasis on selection and appraisal• Less unmanaged persistence of digital materials• A much clearer view of the value of digital assets

‘Digital Asset’ is a good term. It sets up an expectation that the digital object in question has value and therefore requires curation. It is an asset not a liability ...

But the analogy with financial investment doesn’t follow through and we shouldn’t expect it to.

International collaboration intuitively seems like a good idea – and should realise benefits. But is that only at the operational level? At the management level is there always going to be economic competitiveness between organisations?

Are we talking about two different economies ?

Have we got a clear idea of actually what the hardest problem is?

Perhaps getting costs from organisations isn’t THE problem. The problem is motivating them to calculate them. Or ensuring that we can effectively anonymise the data.

Some final thoughts ...