March 11, 2015

Resource Released – Getting to the Bottom Line: 20 Cost Questions for Digital Preservation

The MetaArchive Cooperative is pleased to make available a new cost resource to assist institutions with their comparative analyses of various digital preservation solutions, both community-based solutions (e.g., MetaArchive) as well as vendor-based solutions.

Getting to the Bottom Line: 20 Cost Questions for Digital Preservation

Features and functionality of a solution are important, but those are often the easy pieces of information to learn about. Identifying and comparing short- and long-term costs, including a variety of of up-front, recurring, and sometimes hidden fees, can make Getting to theBottom Line a difficult task. As much as institutions would like for cost information to be open and available, often times getting to the true cost of long-term preservation comes down to a one-shot conversation with a solution provider representative. If you don’t know what questions to ask in the moment you might miss out on significant pieces of information.

Getting to the Bottom Line: 20 Cost Questions for Digital Preservation is a simple, easy-to-use handout to help cover the full terrain of questions – not only the obvious questions about the basic costs of participation and storage fees, but also the less obvious questions surrounding charges for data ingest, retrieval and deletion, and perhaps most importantly fiscal transparency and sustainability.

Our hope is that Getting to the Bottom Line: 20 Cost Questions for Digital Preservation can be a helpful starting point for equipping single institutions with the data they need to make confident decisions. We also hope that it will encourage solution providers to make more and more information publicly available so that the broader community can advance the conversation about the economics of digital preservation.

About the MetaArchive Cooperative

The MetaArchive Cooperative is a distributed digital preservation network founded in 2006 so that today’s digital collections will be available to tomorrow’s scholars, researchers, and citizens. MetaArchive is governed and run by its membership, which comprises an international array of more than 50 libraries and archives. Founded more than a decade ago, MetaArchive encourages and enables memory organizations to build their own preservation infrastructures and expertise. The collaborative community wrestles with today’s most challenging digital preservation issues—both experientially through its network and theoretically through the conversations, research projects, and working groups it hosts.