4C - Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

Let's Collaborate!

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Published on Wednesday, 13 March 2013 15:48

Written by Sarah Middleton

So we are up and running and the 4C Project is now a reality! As with all new projects there are a lot of practical matters to attend to, processes to work out and a lot of detail to agree on ... but we're also excited about tackling our objectives and ultimately, helping the international community to get a better understanding of the costs of digital curation.

Here is (most) of the project team assembled at the Technical University of Lisbon where we had our project kickoff meeting a few weeks ago.

It was clear from the discussion that one of the big challenges in the project is going to be ensuring that we gather and share information and data in the most effective and compatible way possible and we had lots of useful discussions about the dependencies between the various areas of our work.

An enormous amount of useful work has already been done on this topic over the years and the time is most definitely right to synthesise and clarify that work. The 4C Project takes the view that organisations who strive to understand how much digital curation may cost them over time will also derive benefit from reflecting on the real value of their digital assets; what level of risk they are prepared to accept in the stewardship of those assets; and what measures are required to ensure that they can be sustainably curated over time. It is a holistic view of 'costs' and as such it could be argued that the project is as interested in the 'economics' of digital curation as it is in the costs.

But that starts getting us into complicated territory and perhaps at this early stage what we need is a nice simple message.

The way we've decided to tackle this work is through collaboration. It's the first word in the title of the project (Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation) and we would really like organisations of all types from all sectors to engage with us and work with us to refine the current resources and methods that are available. One of the first tasks of the project is to make sure that we have a comprehensive view of all the past and current work that has been done in this area and we are trying to be as careful as we can to build on rather than duplicate the effort of others. If you have done (or are doing) relevant work, please make sure that we know about you!

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