Investing in Curation. A Shared Path to Sustainability. Final RoadMap.

Investing in Curation. A Shared Path to Sustainability. Paul Stokes. The 4C project. March 9, 2015.
Digital curation involves managing, preserving and adding value to digital assets over their entire life cycle. Actively managing digital assets maximizes their value and reduces the risk of obsolescence. The costs of curation is a concern to stakeholders. The final version of the road map is now available; it starts with a focus on the costs of digital curation, but the ultimate goal is to change the way that all organizations manage their digital assets.

The vision: Cost modeling will be a part of the planning and management activities of all digital repositories.

• Identify the value of digital assets and make choices
• Value is an indirect economic determinant on the cost of curating an asset. The perception of value will affect the methods chosen and how much investment is required.
• Content owners should have clear policies regarding the scope of their collections, the type of assets sought, the preferred file formats.
• Establish value criteria for assets as a component of curation, understanding that certain types of assets can be re-generated or re-captured relatively easily, thereby avoiding curation costs
• Demand and choose more efficient systems
• Requirements for curation services should be specified according to accepted standards and best practices.
• More knowledgeable customers demanding better specified and standard functionality means that products can mature more quickly.
• Develop scalable services and infrastructure
• Organizations should aim to work smarter and be able to demonstrate the impact of their investments.
• Design digital curation as a sustainable service
• Effective digital curation requires active management throughout the whole lifecycle of a digital object.
• Curation should be undertaken with a stated purpose.
• Making curation a service further embeds the activity into the organization's normal business function.
• Make funding dependent on costing digital assets across the whole lifecycle
• Digital curation activity requires a flow of sufficient resources for the activity to proceed.
• Some digital assets may need to be preserved in perpetuity but others will have a much more predictable and shorter life-span.
• All stakeholders involved at any point in the curation lifecycle will need to understand their fiscal responsibilities for managing and curating the asset until such time that the asset is transferred to another steward in the lifecycle chain.
• Be collaborative and transparent to drive down costs
• Each organization is looking to realize a return on their investment.
• If those who provide digital curation services can be descriptive about their products and transparent about their pricing structures, this will enhance possible comparisons, drive competitiveness and lead the market to maturity.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Why Digital Storage Formats Are So Risky

Why Digital Storage Formats Are So Risky.  Matthew Woollard.  Lifehacker. 25 February 2015.
While it may seem that digital files last forever, the growing digital sphere faces enormous losses. Even Google has been unable to ensure access for its archive of digital content. Technical solutions already exist, but they’re not well known and relatively expensive.

How much are we prepared to pay to ensure that digital content that exists today will be usable in the future? We need to think about the value of the content and decide if it is worth keeping. Determining the value can be difficult. However, "re-use is a significant benefit from preserving data and adds value." Besides economic value, there are also cultural and intellectual reasons for preserving data. An example of preservation of data from the middle ages can be seen with scribes that used wax tablets for temporary records, and parchment for permanent records.

The chances of born-digital material being usable in 100 years will be considerably improved by actively taking steps now to ensure the preservation of the items. Effective digital preservation relies on the activities of the creator as well as the archivist. It is important to make decisions about providing context, the types of formats to use, how to organize the material, and resolving rights issues to avoid future problems. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

ArchivesDirect hosted service

ArchivesDirect website. February 18, 2015.
ArchivesDirect is a web based hosted service of Archivematica offered by DuraSpace for creating OAIS-based digital preservation workflows with content packages that are archived with DuraCloud and Amazon Glacier. It includes open source preservation tools, and generates archival packets using microservices, PREMIS, and mets xml files. ArchivesDirect is intended for small to mid sized institutions. Duraspace is a partnership with DSpace, Fedora, and Vivo.

Pricing and subscription plans include:
ArchivesDirect Standard (System, training, 1 TB): $11,900
ArchivesDirect Digital Preservation Assessment: $4,500
Additional Storage in Amazon S3 and Glacier: $1,000/TB/year

Digital Preservation Matters.

Preserving progress for future generations

Preserving progress for future generations. Rebecca Pool. Research Information. February/March 2015.
Digital preservation remains one of the most critical challenges facing scholarly communities today. From e-journals and e-books to emails, blogs and more, electronic content is proliferating and organizations worldwide are trying to preserve information before the electronic information is lost. Some of the organizations include: Portico (which preserves content on behalf of participating publishers; the number of open access journals it includes is rising, ); CLOCKSS (still grappling with the cost models of providing preservation service).

There is a rising demand for the preservation of dynamic content. No one is able to "capture dynamic content and [preserve] a day-to-day, or even, minute-to-minute feed of this content." There are only snapshots. CLOCKSS is developing the ‘how to’ process to preserve these ‘snapshots’ across multiple locations, validating each against the other, and is also exploring the best pricing structures to preserve such content.

Other organizations include LOCKSS, The Digital Preservation Network, HathiTrust, Preservica, Archivematica, and Rosetta, whose recent clients are the State Library of New South Wales and the State Library of Queensland.

The digital preservation development is clearly gaining momentum, growing in both size and complexity. "Clearly progress is being made and you can measure that by the maturity of solutions on offer." But for most organizations, the urgency of digital preservation has yet to hit home.

"Trying to sell the idea of digital preservation on the basis of return on investment has been very hard. By its nature, it’s a long-term activity and you’re really hedging your bets against future risks. I think we are still in the very early days of genuinely understanding the value of digital assets... and transferring this understanding over to financial assets doesn’t yet work very well." The European consortium 4C (Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation) has been investigating this problem. Their road map helps organisations appraise digital assets, adopt a strategy to grow preservation assets and develop costing processes. In addition they have developed a model for curation costs. The only way to understand the costs of preservation is though sharing, through openness and collaboration.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Curation Costs Exchange: Supporting Smarter Investments in Digital Curation

Curation Costs Exchange: Supporting Smarter Investments in Digital Curation. Sarah Middleton. Educause Review Online. November 10, 2014.

Tools to manage and estimate costs have not been integrated into other digital curation processes or tools. To determine why that is so a consortium of 13 European cost modeling specialists launched the Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation (4C) project.

4C seeks to help organizations better understand the costs and benefits of digital curation and preservation, and to help users draw together existing and useful resources so they can both make their own assessment of existing models and develop their own cost modeling exercises. The Curation Costs Exchange (CCEx), a platform for the exchange and comparison of digital curation costs and cost information, is a key 4C project deliverable developed to support these goals.

The Cost Comparison Tool enables the exchange of sensitive data and gives users the opportunity to identify greater efficiencies, better practices, and valuable information exchanges among peers. There is also the Understand Your Costs toolkit. The Economic Sustainability Reference model highlights key digital curation concepts, relationships, and decision points in a complex problem space, helping users benchmark and compare their own local models.

Digital Preservation Matters.

DuraCloud Now Offers Low Cost Glacier Storage!

DuraCloud Now Offers Low Cost Glacier Storage!  Carol Minton Morris. Duraspace. May 2, 2013.
DuraCloud has increased the long-term storage options that it offers.  This online storage is intended for durable storage, for data archiving and backup, and particularly for data that is infrequently accessed. It has automatic synchronization between primary and secondary copy, and web access to all copies stored in DuraCloud. Pricing is available at http://duracloud.org/pricing.

Digital Preservation Matters.

The cost of doing nothing

The cost of doing nothing. Barbara Sierman. Digital Preservation Seeds. maart 11, 2013.

There has been much discussion on the fact that over the years the digital preservation community has created more than a dozen cost models, which may increase the confusion in digital preservation even bigger. May be this is part of the way things are going: everyone sees his own situation as something special with special needs.

The solution? Creating an existing model or developing a new one. We can expect help from the recently started European project 4C ,”The Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation”. In their introduction they state that “4C reminds us that the point of this investment [in digital preservation] is to realise a benefit”. Less emphasis on the complexity of digital preservation, and more on the benefits. If we have better figures of the benefits of preserving digital material, we are in a better position to estimate what it will cost us if digital materials are not preserved.

Digital Preservation Matters.