The JISC has made a report on digital preservation costs available. “This study has investigated the medium to long term costs to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) of the preservation of research data”. One aim was to provide a methodological foundation on research data costs for national and institutional initiatives.
Our case studies suggest that the service requirements for data collections and the best structure for organising relevant services locally will be more complex than many have thought previously. Both Cambridge and KCL are developing central repositories to work with departmental facilities and discussing federated local data repositories for research data preservation combining services and skills from central and departmental repositories. Costs for the central data repository component at Cambridge and KCL are an order of magnitude greater than that suggested for a typical institutional repository focused on e-publications alone. [Keeping research data safe : JISC]
The authors are my former work colleague Neil Beagrie, Julia Chruszcz and my current work colleague Brian Lavoie. Neil outlines the contents on his blog:
The report itself has chapters covering the Introduction, Methodology, Benefits of Research Data Preservation, Describing the Cost Framework and its Use, Key Cost Variables and Units,the Activity Model and Resources Template, Overviews of the Case Studies, Issues Universities Need to Consider, Different Service Models and Structures, Conclusions and Recommendations. There are also four detailed case studies covering the Universities of Cambridge, King’s College London, Southampton, and the Archaeology Data Service (University of York). [Neil Beagrie’s Blog]
I sense some renewed interest in digital preservation of late. For example, the following two reports came over my desk on the same day a couple of months ago.
- Preservation in the age of large-scale digitization: a white paper by Oya Rieger
- The preservation of digital materials by Priscilla Caplan
