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Share digital curation costs with the 4C Project to gain greater efficiencies
The 4C project is on a quest to gather digital curation costs from the user community in order to enable comparison of cost data across organisations and borders, enabling greater efficiency, better practices and valuable exchanges of information between peers through its Curation Costs Exchange (CCEx).
The CCEx is an online platform for the exchange of curation cost information and a crowd-sourced driven database for the submission and the sharing of cost data. Using the costs data it gathers, the tool will provide automatic generation of results for the purposes of self-assessment, cost comparisons with peers and insights into the financial accounting and activity costs of other organisations.
Alex Thirifays of the Danish National Archive (DNA), who is leading the team collating the cost data, observes “the value we can derive from the CCEx depends entirely on the willingness of organisations to submit their cost data, but more so on their understanding of the benefits that sharing will bring about.
“The more costs are shared, the more we can all learn about making smarter investments in digital curation,” he concludes.
The 4C team has developed a series of mock-ups which demonstrate how the CCEx will work, showing also the wealth of guidance on available cost models and resources for making a strong business case for investment.
While work continues on the framework of the CCEx before the beta version is released in July 2014, the 4C team is inviting digital content producers, owners and creators from organisations of all types share their costs using the CCEx Submission Template.
Luis Faria of KEEP Solutions, leading work on the CCEx framework, reassures those wary of sharing their cost data. “All cost data shared with the 4C project will be treated confidentially and will be used solely for the purposes of building up data sets for the CCEx,” he explains. “We would like as many organisations to share their data as possible, and we know sensitivity is an issue so, even as outputs of the CCEx, your data will remain anonymous.”
The 4C Project’s vision is to create a better understanding of digital curation costs through collaboration through the provision of useful, useable resources which support the process of cost management in digital curation. The CCEx will also provide a platform through which to access all project resources, long after the project ends in February 2015.
To share your cost data or to get involved with the 4C Project contact the DPC for more information: http://www.4cproject.eu/about-us/contacts
