Cost Aspects of Ingest and Normalization

The Danish National Archives, and The Royal Library and the State and University Library are in the process of developing a cost model for digital preservation: Each of the functional entities of the OAIS Reference Model are broken down into measurable, cost-critical activities, and formula are being tailored for each of these in order to create a generic tool for estimating the short and long-term costs of digital preservation. This paper presents an introduction to the subject of the costs of digital preservation and describes the method used to develop the Danish Cost Model for Digital Preservation (CMDP). It then describes how the OAIS functional entity, Ingest, has been included in the model. For institutions basing their digital preservation strategy on migration, a major cost pertaining to Ingest is normalization, a digital migration from production to preservation format and structure, which is often quite complex in comparison to the subsequent migrations within the archive. The paper accounts for three aspects of migrations, which are decisive for the costs: the required migration quality, when in the lifecycle the first migration takes place, and how often subsequent migrations are executed. Lastly – with view to increasing the model’s precision – existing cost data from submission projects have been used to test the CMDP and the results of this test are described