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I've been pondering this a lot lately. We're starting from the ground up on a concerted digital asset management effort after years of one-off solutions. When I arrived, I inherited piles of CDs and DVDs, things stashed on servers all over the place, etc. I am now implementing a digital asset management system (ResourceSpace) to start ordering all this, which will bly tie into our new collections management system and new web content management system. For the moment, I have written a script to copy the resource and preview assets from ResourceSpace to a bucket on S3. (To save bandwidth/time I also used the batch load capability to ship them a hard drive with about 500 GB of data a few weeks ago.) So I now have two copies of all images: one protected by RAID on our iSCSI storage box, and one theoretically spread across multiple data centers at Amazon. Ideally I'd like to have one other copy at one of our remote offices (either online or offline), but that's for the future. I'm not sure we've entirely come to terms with the long term cost of preserving the material. We're buying enough local storage to get through our grant-funded ramp-up. After that replacing/adding drives and servers is going to have to be considered as much of a preservation/conservation expense as replacing the a leaky roof. But it's a relatively new expense (or at least orders of magnitude bigger than it has been for other data systems) so it's something we're going to have to educate people on. -David Dwiggins Historic New England __________ David Dwiggins Systems Librarian/Archivist, Historic New England 141 Cambridge Street, Boston, MA 02114 (617) 227-3956 x 242 ddwiggins [at] historicnewengland.org ( mailto:[log in to unmask] ) http://www.historicnewengland.org ( http://www.historicnewengland.org/ ) >>> Jimmy Ghaphery <[log in to unmask]> 8/27/2009 1:37 PM >>> We have a historic idea of what it means to maintain space for analog collections. For many institutions a lot of that initial funding has come from capital building funds. While the technological solutions are not clear to me at this point (and I'm benefiting from this thread on that), I am not sure if this won't turn into more of a long-term business problem. Has anyone been able to give a projection to their management on what the total cost per TB is for preservation over even a short horizon of 10 years? --Jimmy -- Jimmy Ghaphery Head, Library Information Systems VCU Libraries http://www.library.vcu.edu -- Visit http://www.LymanEstate.org for information on renting the historic Lyman Estate for your next event - a very special place for very special occasions.