Steering Around the Iceberg: Economic Sustainability for Digital Collections

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Steering Around the IcebergEconomic
Sustainability for Digital Collections

• Brian Lavoie
• Research Scientist
• OCLC
• Economics of Digitization Symposium May 18, 2004

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Roadmap

• Economics of long-term digital stewardship
• Digital preservation
• Decision-makers, incentives, and economic
  sustainability
• Solutions?

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Rising digital tide

• Equivalent of 5 exabytes of new information
  created in 2002 (Varian Lyman)
• 92 percent stored on magnetic or optical media
• Mass migration
• Cultural artifacts (images, audio, video, text)
• Electronic publishing (books, journals,
  databases)
• Communication (listservs, blogs, chat rooms)
• Barriers to entry into digital information
  environments relatively low

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Opportunities and challenges

• Digital technologies offer new opportunities to
  create, share, re-purpose, and link information
• but introduce new challenges in managing
  information
• Building digital collections requires substantial
  commitment of time, effort, and resources
• Economic sustainability ability to marshal and
  put to effective use sufficient resources, on an
  ongoing basis, to support long-term stewardship
  of digital materials

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Costs of long-term digital stewardship

• Not cheap!
• Complex technology environment between content
  and user
• Preservation
• Ensure access today, tomorrow, and for future
  generations
• Maintain scholarly/cultural record in both their
  historical continuity and media diversity

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Digital preservation

• Importance of digital preservation
• Digital storage media fragile
• Rapid obsolescence as hardware/software
  environments evolve
• Need to preserve arises earlier and more
  frequently in digital information lifecycle
• Little scope to postpone digital preservation
  activities
• Likely to be ongoing, pre-emptive process
• Preservation resource requirements are higher and
  more immediate
• Total lifecycle costs resemble an iceberg

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Obstacles to economic sustainability

• Preservation historically under-funded
• Digitization/digital collections supported by
  one-off grants, short-term funding, re-allocation
  of existing funds
• Most fundamental problem ensure cooperation
  between key decision-makers associated with
  digital preservation, who collectively
• Determine whether preservation activities will go
  forward
• Are responsible for committing resources to
  preservation

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Key decision-making roles
Archive
Implements and manages preservation process
Beneficiary
Benefits from preservation Directly as end
user Indirectly on behalf of end-users
Rights Holder
Holds right to preserve Can grant/cede right to
another entity
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More about decision-makers

• Decision-makers are roles, not distinct entities
  
• Single institution can fill one, two, or all
  three roles
• Multiple entities can share the same role
• Contributions to sustainability
• Beneficiary need to preserve
• Archive willingness to preserve
• Rights Holder right to preserve
• Sustainable digital collections emerge from
  cooperative interaction between need,
  willingness, and right to preserve

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Organization of decision-making roles

• Analog
• Digital

LIBRARY
Beneficiary
Archive
Rights Holder
REPOSITORY
LIBRARY
Archive
Beneficiary
PUBLISHER
Rights Holder
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Splitting off the Rights Holder role

• Right to preserve usually associated with
  ownership/custody
• Networked digital environments
• Content remains in custody of creator/publisher
• Collecting institutions provide networked access
• Preservation activity must begin early in
  information lifecycle
• While content is outside custody of collecting
  institutions
• Incentive gap
• Rights Holder may not benefit from long-term
  preservation
• Little incentive to commit resources to
  preservation

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Splitting off the Archive role

• Digital preservation activity likely to occur
  earlier and more frequently in information
  lifecycle
• Resource requirements higher
• Technical infrastructure expensive to build
• Very little core funding for digital preservation
• Implies re-allocation of funds away from other
  activities/services
• Institutions may be unwilling to take on Archive
  role
• Incentive problem
• High costs of digital preservation exceed benefits

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Remedies?

• Rights Holder has no incentive to preserve
• Legal Environment (legislation, directives,
  mandates)
• Negotiation/Bargaining
• Beneficiary/Rights Holder unwilling to take on
  Archive role
• Collaboration, coordination, and centralization
  of digital preservation activities
• Leverage common infrastructure, exploit economies
  of scale, and eliminate redundancies
• Reduce costs and increase incentives to preserve

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Steering around the iceberg

• Sustainable digital collections require long-term
  commitment of time, effort, resources
• Much of these costs bound up in securing the
  long-term accessibility of digital materials
• Economic sustainability requires cooperation
  between all key decision-making roles
• Beneficiary, Archive, and Rights Holder
• In networked digital environments, one or more
  decision-making roles may become detached from
  collecting institutions
• Creates potential for incentive gaps, which
  threaten economic sustainability

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More information

• Lavoie, B.F. (2003) The Incentives to Preserve
  Digital Materials Roles, Scenarios, and Economic
  Decision-Making OCLC Research White Paper,
  available at
• http//www.oclc.org/research/projects/digipres
  /incentives-dp.pdf
• Lavoie, B.F. (2004) Of Mice and Memory
  Economically Sustainable Preservation for the
  21st Century in Access in the Future Tense
  (Council on Library and Information Resources).
  Available at
• http//www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub126/pub126.pd
  f
• lavoie_at_oclc.org