KRDS2 and the cost of Digital Preservation
Posted by Marieke Guy on May 20th, 2010
I’ve been taking a look at the final report for Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (KRDS2) which is now available from the JISC Web site. The KRDS2 study report presents the results of a survey of available cost information, validation and further development of the KRDS activity cost model, and a new taxonomy to help assess benefits alongside costs, it was conducted by Charles Beagrie Ltd. and associates.
One of the key findings of the report is on the long-term costs of digital preservation for research data:
“The costs of archiving activities (archival storage and preservation planning and actions) are consistently a very small proportion of the overall costs and significantly lower than the costs of acquisition/ingest or access activities for all our case studies in KRDS2. As an example the respective activity staff costs for the Archaeology Data Service are Access (c.31%), Outreach/Acquisition/Ingest (c.55%), Archiving (c.15%). “
The conclusions are drawn from 13 survey responses for different cost datasets. Bearing in mind the Blue Ribbon Task Force Report and its economic framework it seems to me that research into preservation costing tools and cost benefit analyses are fairly key at this moment in time.