Breaking down the Costs
The JISC has commissioned a study of the costs (open and hidden) involved in the digitisation of a range of resources, considering costs across the project lifecycle from the selection of relevant material through to the delivery of the digitised content.
Both the full report and briefing paper can be downloaded from here.
Some of the key findings of the study were
- Recruiting staff can be challenging. Digitisation projects are typically short-term, and some regions do not have an established pool of staff available to fill these contracts.
- Difficulty in recruiting staff will have knock-on impacts on project schedule and budget.
- University administration may have a different view to project directors of the grade that staff working on digitisations projects should be appointed to. This can cause delays in recruitment.
- Collections that are not well understood (poorly indexed, heterogeneous) are difficult to digitise, and present particular problems when outsourcing digitisation. Effort spent upfront investigating the collection is helpful in reducing uncertainty.
- It is important to consider the tools that will be used to catalogue collections, in detail and upfront. If digitisation is being outsourced, this includes the tools that the supplier will provide to the project. Inadequate tools will significantly hamper workflow throughput.
- Clearing Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) is very challenging. Undertaking IPR clearance will require substantial effort and expertise but may be worthwhile nonetheless
- Digitisation projects usually end by transitioning to a service to make the content available online. The design of this service, both technical and aesthetic, should be considered in detail early in the project, as it will affect many other decisions.
- Services that make available collections of significant public interest may attract extensive media attention. A plan should be in place for handling this, both in terms of staff time and technical capacity to handle demand.
Understanding the costs of digitisation by Curtis & Cartwright is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.