4C - Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

Crunching the Numbers and Comparing the Costs at Jisc Digifest 2014

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Created on Monday, 03 March 2014 11:52

4C Project Co-ordinator Neil Grindley will be hosting an Expert Speaker Session at the 2014 Jisc Digital Festival in Birmingham on Tuesday 11^th March, next week. The festival is an opportunity to showcase and celebrate the very best in UK digital talent by bringing together experts and providers from the higher education, further education and skills sectors to share ideas and best practice.

The Expert Session will explain how the work of the 4C Project ‘Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation,’ aims to improve the comparability of data across organisations, helping make efficiency gains that will ultimately help to either reduce costs or to improve organisational capacity to curate and preserve additional digital assets.

Nearly all universities and colleges have some responsibility for managing digital assets and where those assets need to be cared for over time, some level of investment in digital curation automatically becomes a necessity. Neil explains that ‘4C is designing and developing a range of planning tools to help inform better decision-making in the cost management of this digital curation.’

Some of the critical outputs to be produced within the final year of the project include the Curation Costs Exchange (CCEX), a Cost Concept Model, and the Economic Sustainability Reference Model (ESRM). The session will introduce and explain the impact these resources are expected to make, and how these resources will be made available to the digital curation community.

Having already created a sizeable registry of open information related to digital curation costs through its ‘Community Resources’ section of the project website, the 4C Project is an ‘open and social’ project, relying on input from stakeholders and practitioners to make sure the best resources are developed for their user community.

The consortium undertaking the 4C project is made up of 13 European organisations with extensive domain expertise and experience with curation cost modelling issues. The project team includes national libraries and archives, specialist preservation and curation membership organisations, service providers, research departments and SMEs and is coordinated by Jisc.

To get involved with the 4C project, visit project partners DPC on stand 19 at Digifest or contact the team.