Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

The Action Sessions - 4C Case Studies and Quantitative Data

Our goal was to try and get commentary and verification on some 4C concepts and objectives and then to crowdsource some data and actively collaborate with participants ...

We did some exercises and collected data

We set out some objectives and checked some assumptions

We heard new stakeholder perspectives

This slide deck is an annotated version of the Action Session summary I gave on the last day of the ANADP II conference .... (with an extra 2 slides to feature some results of a ranking exercise we did during the session)

Exercise 1A journey that you are familiar with ...

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Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

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5What strikes you about your journey?

Digital Curation is a journey not a place ...

We asked people to think about ....

We said make a list of ....

Exercise 1A journey that you are familiar with ...

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Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

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What strikes you about your journey?

Digital Curation is a journey not a place ...

Home

Junction to decide which route – depends on traffic

Narrow section on lane with oncoming traffic

Zig-zag – oncoming lorries

Petrol station

Car park (taffic)

“My spot” to drop (School)

This was one example of what people came up with ....

Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

Exercise 2In relation to your activity ... what are the associated cost categories?

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Then we got them to think about what this journey cost and what the cost components were ....

Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

Exercise 3How might you describe the sequencing of a digital asset in your organisation?

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Then we asked them to apply this approach to the journey a digital asset makes through time ....

Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

Exercise 4In relation to your digital asset ... what are the associated cost categories?

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Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

Exercise 4In relation to your digital asset ... what are the associated cost categories?

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Capital investment for physical infrastructure

Capital investment for e-infrastructure

Operating costs physical inc. staff to run instruments & work with visitors Visiting scientists

time

Operating costs e-infra inc. staff to talk to physical infra people

Small marginal cost of each dataset (media etc.)

Software development for data analysis & maintenance

Consultation with users to plan future developments and keep service relevant

This is an example of how one of the participants broke down the cost categories of managing assets over time ...

Exercise 5 - Indirect Economic Determinants To what extent would your organisation regard the following 15 outcomes as an investment priority?

IED High Medium Low Notes

Authenticity

Benefit

Efficiency

Impact

Innovation

Interoperability

Quality

Reputation

Risk

Sensitivity

Skills

Sustainability

Transparency

Trustworthiness

Value

We asked them to prioritise what the 4C project is calling the indirect economic determinants of digital curation ...

17 forms were returned at the end of the session and the ranked results are below ...

Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

Value

Trustworthiness

Risk

Sustainability

Reputation

Impact

Efficiency

Benefit

Quality

Authenticity

Interoperability

Transparency

Skills

Innovation

Sensitivity

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

Risk

Trustworthiness

Sustainability

Benefits

Efficiency

Value

Transparency

Reputation

Confidentiality

Interoperability

Flexibility

Sensitivity

Impact

Authenticty

Innovation

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

Which loosely correlates in places with an earlier iteration of the exercise carried out with a completely different group 2 months earlier ...

‘Flexibility’ and ‘Confidentiality’ have been replaced in the later exercise by ‘Skills’ and ‘Quality’

Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

Discussion ....

To what extent can digital curation adopt the approach where we benchmark against an ‘industry standard’ (e.g. insurance comparison sites)

Larger organisations don’t need a Curation Costs Exchange – the value of it will be for smaller organisations who need to understand cost structures for planning their budgets

OpenAIRE is doing a costs/benefits analysis of running an institutional repository

4C should explain terminology and let people combine their cost structures themselves

We need a very concise way of bringing out the benefits of investing into digital curation. The costs should always be linked to the benefits. Focusing on the return on investment is vital

We need to acknowledge that calculating the cost of curation is a significant cost in itself

Data usage (web stats etc. any quantitative figures for data use are very important)

THANKYOU and please continue to help us with this work www.4Cproject.eu

The main points to come out in discussion were as follows ...

We now need to analyse the cost categories that people defined on their sheets ...