JISC has just released the final report of a major study of the costs of preserving research data. The details are below.

Clifford Lynch

Director, CNI

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JISC is pleased to announce that the final report for Keeping Research Data Safe 2 (KRDS2) is now available from the JISC website. This KRDS2 study report presents the results of a survey of available cost information, validation and further development of the KRDS activity cost model, and a new taxonomy to help assess benefits alongside costs. The KRDS2 study was conducted by Charles Beagrie Ltd. and associates.

 

KRDS2 has delivered the following:

 

·         A survey of cost information for digital preservation, collating and making available 13 survey responses for different cost datasets;

 

·         The KRDS activity model has been reviewed and its presentation and usability enhanced;

 

·         Cost information for four organisations (the Archaeology Data Service; National Digital Archive of Datasets; UK Data Archive; and University of Oxford) has been analysed in depth and presented in case studies;

 

·         A benefits framework has been produced and illustrated with two benefit case studies from the National Crystallography Service at Southampton University and the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex.

 

One of the key findings on the long-term costs of digital preservation for research data was that the cost of archiving activities (archival storage and preservation planning and actions) is consistently a very small proportion of the overall costs and significantly lower than the costs of acquisition/ingest or access activities for all the case studies in KRDS2. As an example the respective activity staff costs for the Archaeology Data Service are Access (c.31%), Outreach/Acquisition/Ingest (c.55%), Archiving (c.15%).This confirms and supports a preliminary finding in KRDS1.

 

Full URL:

 

A range of supplementary materials in support of this report have also been made available on the KRDS project website. This includes the ULCC Excel Cost Spreadsheet for the NDAD service together with a Guide to Interpreting and Using the NDAD Cost Spreadsheet. The NDAD Cost Spreadsheet has previously been used as an exercise in digital preservation training events and may be particularly useful in training covering digital preservation costs. The accompanying Guide provides guidance to those wishing to understand and experiment with the spreadsheet.

 

 

Neil Grindley

Programme Manager

Digital Preservation & Records Management

1st Floor Brettenham House (South)

5 Lancaster Place

London

WC2E 7EN

tel: 0203 006 6059

email: n.grindley@jisc.ac.uk