Steering Around the Iceberg: Economic Sustainability for Digital Collections

1. Steering Around the Iceberg:Economic Sustainability for Digital Collections Brian Lavoie Research Scientist OCLC Economics of Digitization Symposium: May 18, 2004

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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. Organization of decision-making roles Analog Digital LIBRARY Beneficiary Archive Rights Holder REPOSITORY LIBRARY Archive Beneficiary PUBLISHER Rights Holder

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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.pdf • lavoie@oclc.org