LIFE2 case study:
SHERPA DP
Stephen Grace
Centre for e-Research
What is SHERPA DP?
Providing digital preservation services to
institutional repositories
Following OAIS functional model
Institutional repository responsible for first
acquisition of content
Funded by JISC and CURL
2
Bringing SHERPA DP to LIFE
Some costs were easy to find
• Directly incurred staff costs
Others less so
• Directly allocated staff time
• Mists of time
Used TRAC for full Economic Cost (fEC)
• Estates and Indirect costs added to salary
3
1 Creation or purchase
Cost = £0
No creation, no purchase
4
2 Acquisition
Aq = £74,050 in Yr1, £77,510 in Yr5,
£81,515 in Yr10
Majority of costs for development of OAIPMH and integrating harvester with AHDS
repository
5
3 Ingest
I = £763 in Y1, £2841 in Y5, £7630 in Y10
QA largely responsibility of source IRs
Characterisation is automated via DROID
6
4 Metadata creation
M = £0
Implicit in other areas
PREMIS generated automatically
7
5 Bit-stream preservation
BP = £19,848 in Y1, £125,870 in Y5,
£223,818 in Y10
Duplicate storage and storage provision
major costs
8
6 Content preservation
CP = £13,233 in Y1, £64,615 in Y5,
£129,217 in Y10
Technology watch, preservation planning
consistent across time
Harder to predict preservation action so
assumed major task every 3 years
9
7 Access
Ac = £11,907 in Y1, £45,875 in Y5,
£88,334 in Y10
Almost entirely for user support (in this
case, of our IR colleagues)
SHERPA DP2 will address return of
content to repositories
10
Lessons learned
Costing exercises are difficult – they take
time, evidence not readily to hand
LIFE offers a consistent methodology
Value of third-party preservation service
11
Key findings and costs
Year 1
Year 5
Year 10
Total cost
£119,801
Cost per
object
£18.36
Annual
cost/object
£18.36
£317,711
£48.68
£9.74
£530,515
£81.29
£8.13
10yr cost per object preserved = £8.13 (N=6526)
Reducing storage costs will have significant effect
12
Conclusions
Third-party preservation can be costeffective
LIFE methodology works for us
Helps with development of a charged
preservation service
13
Why it was useful
Comparison across services and
institutional settings
Costs  Cost model  Business model
Dovetails with our case study for ‘Keeping
research data safe’
14
Thank you
Stephen Grace
Centre for e-Research
King’s College London
www.kcl.ac.uk
[email protected]
020 7848 1972
15