Economic Sustainability Reference Model

(UPDATED draft 0.9)

I have mentioned in the blog that Brian Lavoie of OCLC and I are undertaking a project for JISC and OCLC Research, to develop a Reference Model for Economic Sustainability of Digital Curation, from the work of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. The sections were drafted initially as blog posts. This page links together the latest versions of those sections, so following the links here should give you some idea how things are progressing.

We were hoping that readers would leave comments on these drafts that would help us develop them. In practice, this didn’t really happen very much.

We were also hoping to circulate the consolidated document for public comment. On reflection, we have decided to delay that step. The main reason is the lack of the important Tools section. We also want to include a worked example, based on the Tools. Brian is now working on both these steps. Meanwhile, we have circulated the draft to a small number of experts, most of whom attended the workshop in Tallinn earlier this year. For completeness, the current draft is available here as a PDF (Reference-model-0-6-clean). And yes, I know that there is a blank page and that the page numbers are out of sync!

We are publishing the commentary we have received as guest blog posts:

1. the first of these, from Sarah Higgins of Aberystwyth includes a suggested revision to the economic lifecycle model,
2. one from Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R
3. one from Nancy Maron, also from Ithaka S+R
4. a comment from Martin Iordanidis of Hochschulbibliothekszentrum des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (HBZ, North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre), and
5. a comment from Sabine Schrimpf from DNB/nestor.

This is the draft Table of Contents, with links to latest versions where available:

Scope TBA

1) Introduction (draft 3)

Figure: diagrammatic structural representation

2) Summary of model

3) Economic lifecycle model

Figure: diagram of lifecycle

4) Sustainability strategy

Figure: sustainability strategy diagram

5) Economic risks to sustainability

6) Key entities and properties revised

7 ) Sustainability concepts

• include glossary and definitions

9) Tools

10) Examples and case studies: sustainability in context

Commercially-owned cultural content

Collectively-produced web content

Research data

Scholarly communications

• these examples are useful and interesting but do not yet relate sufficiently to the sustainability reference model; they will need to be updated, supplemented or removed at later stages.