Controlling the cost of long-term digital accessibility. A cost model for long-term digital accessibility

For some time now, heritage organisations and other institutions have been in agreement about the need for the long-term preservation and accessibility of valuable digital resources. What is much less clear, however, is how much this would cost. In many cases, not enough consideration is given to the long-term cost of curating digital collections, often because very little is actually known about this aspect. As a result, such management costs are often not included in institutions’ ordinary operating expenses. Moreover, many heritage institutions tend to assume that the long-term costs are very high, partly due to the exponential rise in the volume of material, whether digitised or born-digital. In many cases, incidental revenue (i.e. project income) is used to pay for long-term management costs. But is this assumption correct? And how can we control the cost of curating digital collections in the long term? We have designed a cost model for analysing and controlling the cost of long-term digital accessibility.