DPHEP full costs of curation workshop CERN, 13/14 January 2014

Title: “The costs in digital curation – activities and approaches to cost modeling in the 4C project” Scope: 20-30 min. Speaker: tba Keywords: Digital curation, cost modeling

Digital preservation and curation activities tend to be costly and complex and require a long term commitment. Without reliable cost information and accurate cost models, it is hard to plan and calculate such activities adequately.

The EU project 4C - ‘a Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation’ – works closely with existing projects and initiatives and will ensure that where existing work is relevant, stakeholders are aware of tools and models and understand how to employ them. A key aim for 4C’s work is to build bridges between on-going costs-related initiatives to enable 4C to identify areas where good progress has been made and also to understand how current cost models might be augmented to improve ease of use and increase uptake. Ultimately, 4C will help organizations to approach their investment in and preservation with greater certainty and with greater clarity about what they will get back in return.

In this presentation the significance of reliable cost information in digital long term preservation is examined. Several international initiatives have developed tools for cost modelling; an explanatory overview will be presented. The 4C project brings together all of these approaches and initiatives and develops them further. The holistic approach of the 4C project does not only contain the costs but also other economic factors such as value, benefit, risk and sustainability. Furthermore, the results and outcomes of the 4C work, such as the Evaluation of Cost Models and Needs & Gap Analysis or the Economic Sustainability Reference Model, will be presented here.