Having done some research in this area for a chapter in
soon-to-be-published  book, I concur with C. Sean Burns, Amy Lana and John
M. Budd that "Little is known about the costs academic libraries incur to
implement and manage institutional repositories and the value these
institutional repositories offer to their communities."  [1] Anyway, you
may want to read their article and the many resources it cites. Good luck!

Edward

[1] http://dlib.org/dlib/january13/burns/01burns.html


On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 3:04 PM, scott bacon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> It may be a fool's errand to ask how much it would cost to implement an
> open source institutional repository, but here goes!
>
>
> Let's first focus on open source and say that there won't be vendor costs
> for ingesting or downloading materials, that we already have our own
> purchased servers dedicated to the IR, our own digitization program
> (scanners and staff), and that we have already tallied cloud-based storage
> and preservation costs.
>
>
> I have heard that the costs of implementing an open source IR can be as
> cheap as how much employee time is dedicated to the project. So you have a
> programmer spend a year or so on implementation and hire a librarian to
> manage it after that, let's say. Beyond that, are there any hard-and-fast
> costs associated with getting an IR up and running?
>
>
> I have also read somewhere that it costs just as much to implement an open
> source IR as it does a proprietary one, but we'd certainly like to reap the
> benefits of having ultimate control over our own system if at all possible.
>
>
> By the way, if it helps, my institution is classified *Master's S*, with an
> undergraduate enrollment of just under 10,000.
>
>
> Numbers will vary wildly of course, but if anyone could give an idea of the
> cost of any component of a project like this, open source or proprietary,
> it would be most helpful.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Scott Bacon
>