Sustainability of Digital Collections

Last updated: 10 November 2008
Published in: Managing a project | Managing your digital resources
Tags: digital collections | digitisation | funding | sustainability

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Summary

Once funding for a digitisation project comes to an end, how will you ensure the long term sustainability of your newly-created collection? This is a fundamental question that needs to be addressed at the outset of the project. This document looks at different approaches to sustainability and discusses the factors you need to take into consideration when planning for sustainability. We will highlight the practical steps a project can take and examine various options for financing the ongoing maintenance and availability of the collection beyond the life of the project.

Contents

• Introduction
• Approaches to sustainability
• Planning for sustainability
  • Practical measures to help ensure sustainability
  • Ongoing maintenance
  • Options for financing sustainability
• Related resources

Introduction

A sustainable digital collection is in essence one that will continue to exist long after its initial project funding has ended. As such, planning for the sustainability of the digital resource should form part of your project's 'exit strategy'. An exit strategy is the plan that details a project's options for the future after the project ends. An exit strategy will of course be specific to each individual project, but sustainability is one of the key factors that will shape such a strategy. If you cannot ensure the sustainability of your digital collection, then all the effort/work/time/money invested to create it will have been for nothing. This is why you must plan for sustainability as early on as possible.

If a digital collection is to be sustainable, a sound digital preservation strategy needs to be in place. We recommend that you read this document in conjunction with our documents: An Introduction to Digital Preservation and Establishing a Digital Preservation Policy.

Approaches to sustainability

Depending on the project, the sustainability of a resource will involve one or more of the following approaches: continued maintenance of the resource; continued development of the resource; integration into a larger resource; or some form of re-purposing for use in another resource altogether.

• Continued maintenance
  Once the project ends, the resource continues to be looked after and maintained (see Ongoing maintenance below), but it does not develop in terms of new content or additional features.
• Continued development
  Once the project ends, the resource continues to grow and/or develop. This will involve building on the project's existing work and in some cases making the transition from project to service or programme. Either way will require significant further funding (see Options for financing sustainability below).
• Integration
  Integrating the material into a third party's existing collection will not necessarily involve further funding, but it will require forward planning in terms of interoperability and use of standards.
• Re-purposing
  Again, interoperability will be key if you are planning for the material to be re-used in another resource. Depending on the type of media in the collection, re-purposing might involve creating variations based on file type, file size, audio quality, clip duration, image resolution or colour mode for use elsewhere; or it could mean reworking the metadata to meet the needs of a new audience.

Planning for sustainability

Whichever approach is taken, there are three key factors to take into consideration when planning for sustainability. The first is to look at the practical steps you can take to help ensure your resource is sustainable. The second is to understand the level of ongoing maintenance that will be required to sustain the resource. The last, and by no means least, is to examine the options available for financing sustainability. Clearly, the question of finance is the factor which will have most influence, and it is this which will ultimately determine sustainability.

Practical measures to help ensure sustainability

There are certain practical measures you can take when planning and creating the resource which will help increase the chances of its sustainability.

• Flexible design - to assist in future data migration (see our docment An Introduction to Digital Preservation), resources should be designed so that their individual components (i.e. digital objects, presentational elements) are distinct and detachable. In other words, each component can be updated, altered or removed without interfering with another part of the system. This will also allow for contribution to other resources or for re-purposing the data.
• Flexible approach - project managers and others involved in decision-making should maintain a flexible approach throughout the life of the project. Of course, you should take care to stay within the scope of the project, but a flexible approach will be particularly important when negotiating intellectual property rights or commissioning content, keeping your options open for possible re-use of content.
• Using appropriate standards - to ensure interoperability and longevity, standard file formats, metadata, storage media and delivery systems should be used. Use of standards in these areas will improve the likelihood of the collection or its components being used and will facilitate their inclusion within other resources. Good administrative metadata, for example, will support re-purposing and ease future data migration (see our document An Introduction to Digital Preservation). If you are unfamiliar with JISC standards, the Standards and Guidelines to Build a National Resource (February 2001, PDF file) provides "guidelines and practices critical to developing, managing, and delivering digital resources online", and the JISC Standards Catalogue also provides a useful summary of some relevant standards.
• QA and evaluation - quality assurance and continuous evaluation throughout the project will ensure that the finished resource is of value and relevance to its users, and will help identify further development or re-purposing opportunities.
• Documentation - careful documentation of all aspects of the project (systems and processes, workflow methodology, standards, schemas, formats, other technical details) is fundamental to the sustainability of a resource beyond the lifetime of the project. Documentation will also play an important role during the development of the project, should there be a change in staff or project direction.

Ongoing maintenance

For a digital collection to be sustainable it will require a certain level of ongoing maintenance once the project itself has ended. Depending on the individual project's approach to sustainability and how well-planned it is, the level of maintenance required will vary enormously. For example, a project which plans to hand over its digital collection to a third party may not need to concern itself with ongoing technical support, but will certainly need to be involved if there are plans to update the content on a regular basis.

The types of maintenance that may be required:

• Availability - ensuring the resource is available to all those who need it, whenever they require it. On the Web this means offering an uninterrupted service 24 hours a day, so suitable technical support will be required.
• Security procedures - user authentication, management of access privileges, virus protection, backup systems, and storage of archival copies (including remote storage).
• Digital rights management - systems to control correct use of digital assets.
• Content - maintaining the content itself (if applicable updating content with new material, editing/removing existing material, updating metadata in existing records, correcting errors) - keeping the resource dynamic, relevant and up-to-date.
• Future watch - keeping up to date with emerging technologies, ensuring the delivery system is compatible with latest browsers, conforms to current accessibility guidelines, is platform independent, responsive to changing user needs.
• Administration - need staff and equipment to support and administer all the above. If a project wants to keep on experienced staff, there needs to be a smooth transition between project and service.

Options for financing sustainability

All the measures described so far will of course require financial support, but where will this come from once the project funding ends?

In order to secure finances to maintain the availability of the digital materials beyond the life of the project, you will need to look at one, or a combination, of the following:

• Core funding - depending on the type of project and its perceived value within the host institution, it may be possible to secure support from the institution's core funding. This has obvious advantages, but may mean the resource is in regular competition for funding with other institutional projects and services. As digital collections gain higher profiles, it may become easier to persuade institutions to look on them as institutional assets worthy of long-term investment, rather than as short-term 'projects'. It may be possible to negotiate ongoing technical support from the host institution if this is something that has been provided during the life of the project.
• New funding - the project's original funding source may consider further funding. Seeking help from new sources may also prove successful, especially if you are able to highlight the project's achievements to date and emphasise how you will be able to build on these (for example, by delivering new content/resources). Our document Potential Sources of Funding for Digitisation Projects provides a useful list of funding bodies.
• Online sales - there may be an opportunity to recover costs directly from the digital content itself. This could involve licensing reproduction rights or selling physical copies (e.g. prints or posters) to a variety of audiences (commercial/educational/public). Implementing such a strategy would require sales and order processing systems, customer billing, possible royalty payment to third parties (i.e. content owners). All this can be complicated and expensive to set up, and will require experienced staff to administer. Note that it will often be difficult to ensure a reliable income from sales, unless the collection is particularly suited to commercial exploitation. Indeed, it may not be appropriate at all for some collections, and proper market research will be needed to assess demand. This in turn costs time and money. A Mellon Foundation funded study Reproduction Charging Models and Rights Policy for Digital Images in American Art Museums was completed in 2004.
• Third party sales - bearing in mind the same issues raised for online sales (above), it may be possible to link to a third party selling products related to your content. Online retailer Amazon for example has an 'Associates Program' that offers a referral fee to sites that provide links to Amazon products, so long as a purchase is made of course.
• Third party licensing - some collections may consider licensing the content as a whole (or in part) to a third party, or integrating it into an existing collection. By handing over content to an organisation that specialises in marketing, licensing, distributing and storing digital content, you will avoid many of the costs involved in sustaining the resource. This could be a commercial organisation (e.g. a digital image library) or a cultural/educational one, e.g. VADS (Visual Arts Data Service). You need to be aware that commercial organisations will usually have very strict conditions and requirements and may not be interested in more than a very small proportion of the collection. Additionally, you will need to make sure you know how the content is likely to be used and stipulate in the contract any restrictions on usage. Giving content to a third party may suit some projects more than others - for example, a complete collection which is 'static' and unlikely to grow is more suited to being licensed in full, than a dynamic collection which is forever being added to and amended.
• Subscription - asking users to pay a subscription fee to receive an extended service. This may be difficult to implement if everything has been previously free of charge, but if you can offer added value it may be a useful way of generating income. You may decide to set different rates depending on the user (e.g. general public, schools, FE/HE, commercial). It will be important to decide where to draw the line between what is freely available and what is availbale only to subscribers, without alienating non-subscribers. A popular option with subscription sites is to allow free access to search and browse the collection, but to limit search results to thumbnail images or short audio/video clips only. Subscribers would have access to full versions and perhaps more detailed metadata, but would need to pay a regular (annual/monthly) fee for the privilege. Remember that while subscription fees will be a regular source of income, you can only rely on them as long as your subscribers continue to need or value your service.
• Sponsorship - there are two main options for having your content/service sponsored. Either by having one or two main sponsors, who will pay to have their name/products on your site, or by having a larger number of individual sponsors (or 'friends') who each pay a small contribution towards running costs. The first option can pose problems: it may be difficult to find a suitable sponsor or combination of sponsors willing to share space with each other. Commercial sponsors may make specific demands on the amount of space they are given or how large their name is displayed. The second option will require a lot of promotional work to find individuals or companies willing to support you and may take a lot of effort to sustain year on year.
• Advertising - charging other organisations a fee to advertise their wares is extremely common on commercial sites. It is not uncommon for non-commercial sites to use advertising as a source of revenue, but it can prove difficult to generate a reliable income - unless the site has a lot of traffic. Remember that web advertising can involve a lot more than a simple banner at the top of a page. Flashing animations, pop-up windows, floating and/or animated advertisements that cover up a page's content for a few seconds, and numerous other irritating and cunning ways of getting users to click through to advertisers' sites all contribute to increasing discontent towards web advertising in any guise. For this reason, extreme care should be taken to make sure any advertising you decide to use is appropriate and sensitive to your users' needs - and this may put many advertisers off! Less obtrusive text ads, such as those provided by Google's AdSense, are related to the content on your web pages. They are relatively easy to set up, but the income from these is unlikely to be very high. In all cases where advertising via a UK educational web site is being considered, you are advised to refer to JANET's Acceptable Use Policy (PDF) on advertising.

It would seem that there are quite a number of potential ways of raising funds for sustaining a digital resource, but each one has to be considered very carefully. Certainly in the case of sales, sponsorship and advertising there are likely to be potential conflicts with the non-profit nature of the host institution. It will be equally important to consider the users of the collection - will they be put off by advertisements or object to the sale of content? Any foray into the commercial sector will need to be handled sensibly, making it clear to all (i.e. users, host institutions and other funders) that any income being generated is being put back into providing the service.

Conclusion

When planning for the sustainability of your resource, you need to be aware that any ongoing expenditure will have to be justified - setting aside time and resources to evaluate the project and establish that your users' needs are still being met is therefore a vital part of any exit strategy.

It cannot be emphasised too strongly how important it is to plan for sustainability from the start, as part of the project's exit strategy. Recent project experience from within the education community supports this, and JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), which funds a wide range of UK Further and Higher Education projects and services (including digitisation projects), outlines in its Project Management Guidelines its policy on exit strategies and sustainability for all JISC development activities.

Europe's Dynamic Action Plan for the EU co-ordination of digitisation of cultural and scientific content recognises the importance of sustainability of digital cultural assets and services. One of its key actions is to "develop and promote the implementation of funding and business models that support economic sustainability of digital cultural content".

It's worth looking at the Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability project, which takes a detailed look at 12 projects "with special attention paid to their strategies for cost management and revenue generation".

The future of the digital resource that you and your colleagues will be spending so much time and effort creating is ultimately in your hands. The more time and effort you spend at the start developing a sound exit strategy, the greater the chance your resource will have of being sustained well into the future.

Related resources

• An Introduction to Digital Preservation
• Establishing a Digital Preservation Policy
• Potential Sources of Funding for Digitisation Projects

Last updated: 10 November 2008
Published in: Managing a project | Managing your digital resources
Tags: digital collections | digitisation | funding | sustainability

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