I want to thank those of you who responded privately - the information that
you were able to provide was extremely helpful.

What I found out, privately, was that the costs for either Digital Commons
or ContentDM are in line with what you'll find published on FDPS if you search
for "Digital Commons"
<https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.5.1&s=FPDS.GOV&q=digital+commons>
or you search for "ContentDM
<https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.5.1&s=FPDS.GOV&q=contentdm>".
(Thank you, federal US transparency!)

I had, for example, way underestimated the cost of ContentDM, based on this
published pricing data from 2016
<https://oedb.org/ilibrarian/5-free-and-open-source-tools-for-creating-digital-exhibitions/>
and assumed that educational institutions wouldn't be charged nearly as
much as military organizations. This was not a correct assumption :)

We are very likely to keep trucking on with the DSpace instance that has
been serving us since 2007, holding out hope that the 7.0 release comes
soon and without too many regressions. But having numbers in hand to
demonstrate how much we've been saving & continue to save is pretty
important when your university has declared financial insolvency
<https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/laurentian-university-deficits-report-1.5915327>
.

(BTW, if you're Canadian and want to support the employees at Laurentian
University, like me, who are threatened with mass termination because our
Board of Governors & administration mismanaged our finances for about a
decade, you can send a customized email to the most relevant provincial and
federal politicians <https://lufappul.ca/wp/?page_id=4989> pretty easily)

Many thanks,
Dan

On Sat, 27 Feb 2021 at 16:15, Dan Scott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi, I'm trying to quickly pull together an estimate of the licensing costs
> for Digital Commons and ContentDM vs. our DSpace instance. I don't have
> time to go through a formal quote process. So I'm looking for those at
> higher educational institutions in the same range as us (7,000 full-time
> equivalent students).
>
> I know many of you can't share your licensing costs publicly, but if you
> can, well awesome!
>
> If not, I would certainly appreciate private messages. I promise to keep
> your identity confidential in that case.
>
> Thanks,
> Dan
>