diglib: costs/benefits document for DCC meeting

[Carol Hixson <chixson@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

Attached is a draft of some of the costs and benefits of
digital collections. It should form a starting point for our
discussion of what to include about this in the survey's contextual
document. The text is also included below:
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At this stage of digital collection development, it is difficult to 
quantify the costs and benefits or accurately assess the risks. The 
infrastructure for building, providing access to, and maintaining digital 
collections is too new and evolving too quickly for anyone to have 
developed reliable cost/benefit figures. Costs (staffing, equipment, 
software, storage) can be tracked for specific collections at a particular 
point in time but technological developments and changing expertise will 
continue to change the equation for some time. Risks are generally 
perceived to be high due to the novelty and instability of the media. 
Perceived benefits are easy to articulate but equally difficult to quantify.

While the costs of selection, acquisition, conversion, ingest, cataloging, 
presentation, documentation, and preservation of digital collections are 
still largely guesswork, some of the risks and costs that are commonly 
cited are:

   * A high risk of loss from human error and/or system failure.
   * The expense of keeping up with never-ending product development.
   * A significant capital investment for the underlying support systems 
and the need for integrating the new technologies into existing information 
management procedures and processes.
   * A high initial investment for digital conversion, both in terms if 
equipment and developing workflows and processes.
   * The insecurity of rapidly evolving and competing standards, both in 
terms of potential risk if the wrong standards are selected and in terms of 
the time commitment for keeping informed, reviewing them, and making 
changes when needed.
   * Ongoing costs associated with documenting local policies and practices.
   * The time and expertise needed to re-train existing staff or hire new 
staff with appropriate skills.
   * The fundamental instability of digital media and an uncertain path 
for preservation.

Some of the perceived benefits of digital collections are that they can:
   * Provide access to and greater awareness of underutilized or less 
accessible materials, such as photographs and slides, historical documents, 
government documents, archival materials, and unpublished materials of all 
kinds.
   * Expand access to materials of all kinds by delivering materials 
directly to users remotely and without restrictions based on opening hours 
of the storage facility.
   * Broaden access to physically fragile or rare materials, so that any 
user with computer access can make use of digitized materials without the 
need for special training or authorizations. Because of the quality of the 
digital object, it is often not necessary for the researcher to touch the 
originals at all.
   * Provide new delivery mechanisms for content. The power of full-text 
searching, the ability to search across different digital collections, and 
the combining of disparate physical objects into a new digital object 
facilitates using traditional resources in new ways.
   * Expand support for instructional programs. The use of new interfaces 
combined with new ways to deliver content can revolutionize the ways in 
which research materials are used for teaching and learning.
   * Enable more effective sharing of  limited resources, such as when 
libraries can reduce print subscriptions when their users have access to 
electronic versions of the  content.
   * Preserve at-risk materials. In addition to reducing wear and tear on 
fragile or rare originals, digitization is often undertaken to preserve 
materials whose original form has deteriorated past the point of saving or 
using.
   * Increase institutional visibility.
   * Strengthen and build partnerships with other cultural heritage 
institutions.
   * Provide opportunities to help shape the digital landscape, as we 
participate in the development, testing, and refinement of standards.

Attachment: Costs_benefits.doc
Description: MS-Word document

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