This is a guest post from Sabine Schrimpf and Martin Iordanidis commenting on the draft Economic Sustainability Reference Model. Sabine writes:
The draft was sent to the 9 participants of a nestor group that discussed the Blue Ribbon Task Force Report in 2010. The following answer was received from the Hochschulbibliothekszentrum des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (HBZ, North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre).
Martin writes:
Comments of HBZ
We appreciate the fact that the notion of ‘value’ has been considered explicitly on tomorrows’s premise. We have also learned that use creates value and value justifies preservation. In order to define the return of investment, the draft suggests to ensure “the availability of valuable digital assets”. We also agree that the assertion of value is difficult, if not hardly feasible, for public aid granted or open access resources.
The draft leaves quite open which future value chains we are possibly thinking of – which is certainly fair for an universal reference model trying to support decision-makers. However, we feel that the economic lifecycle model deployed in the currrent discussion is too narrow. We are missing a notion of “aggregated content value” which adds value to potentially any resource, once it becomes part of an aggregated resource.
Aggregated content, in this context, decribes a new level of informational meaning that can be derived from many distributed, yet associated digital resources. Within this ‘second life / afterlife’ of a resource, technically there’s is no such thing like the end of a resource’s economic life. We are not sure whether it is appropriate or essential to refer to the eco4r project, in which we have addressed this issue using a very practical approach to object reuse:
Boulal A. , Iordanidis M. & Quast A. Remember, Restructure, Reuse – Adding value to compound scholarly publications in a digital networked environment. In: Anderson D., Delve J., Dobreva M. & Konstantelos L. (Series Editors). The Preservation of Complex Objects (Volume 1): Visualisations and Simulations (forthcoming) Remember, Restructure, Reuse – Adding value to compound scholarly publications in a digital networked environment
You may find it at http://www.eco4r.org/news/pocos-preprint
best regards
Martin Iordanidis
hbz Library Service Center, Cologne
