It sounds like you're saying that you're going to make a one year
commitment to develop software and then you're going to walk away from the
code/software/what have you, is that correct?  If that is correct, my
question to you is: would you purchase software from a vendor that said,
"Yeah we built this but we're never going to improve upon it, fix bugs, or
add features ever again?"  Probably not, most likely you'd run screaming
from the meeting and tell all you're friends that they are one crazy
vendor.

By definition an institutional repository seeks to gather and store data
for an extended period of time, possibly forever.  Systems change
(operating system upgrades, adding storage, hardware upgrades), software
changes (new features needed, bug fixes, upgrades to programming
languages/frameworks, etc.) and institutions themselves change
(re-organization, people coming and going, etc.).  If I were starting down
this road, I would think of implementation of an IR in terms of product
management <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_management> rather than
project management -- after all, few things in this world are rarely just a
project, most require an ongoing commitment.


On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 7:44 AM, Edward M. Corrado <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> 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
> >
>