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I write to share this message about work in progress by the DLF Assessment Interest Group’s subcommittee on cost assessment.  Joyce Chapman, Kinza Masood, Chrissy Rissmeyer, and Dan Zellner invite your contributions of data to further the development of a Digitization Cost Calculator. 

Learn more about DLF's Digital Library Assessment Interest Group here: http://www.diglib.org/groups/assessment/ 

Current subcommittees are focusing on tools and best practices documents to support cost assessment, ways to measure the benefits of investing in digital libraries, and assessment of user needs and usability.

Bethany Nowviskie 
Director of the Digital Library Federation at CLIR
& Research Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at UVa
diglib.org | clir.org | engl.virginia.edu | nowviskie.org

Begin forwarded message:

From: Joyce Chapman <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [digital-library-assessment] Update on the Digitization Cost Calculator, and a call for data submissions
Date: August 31, 2015 at 10:30:22 AM EDT
To: <[log in to unmask]>, <[log in to unmask]>

Last year, we developed a beta version of a Digitization Cost Calculator, meant to help with digitization project planning by estimating cost and time for various aspects of the digitization process. Over the past year, we’ve redesigned the calculator’s interface and worked with the community to choose and define processes that should be included in the calculator (see the processes and definitions document here). Now we need your help; the calculator can’t move forward without data! The current beta calculator includes data submissions from only a few institutions and the submissions do not cover all the areas in which we need data to produce a live version of the revised calculator. Please help us bring the 2.0 version to life by contributing some data from your institution!  

You can contribute just one piece of data -- you don’t have to have all the fields represented in the calculator! Contributions are accepted on an ongoing basis, but please try to contribute whatever you can by the end of September 2015 so we can get the new calculator up and running!

What is does the Cost Calculator do? On the back-end, the calculator aggregates time data contributed by various libraries for different steps of the digitization process. On the front-end, it allows a user to input salary and benefits data, the amount of material being digitized, select which processes they will be undertaking, and then outputs cost and time data based on all aggregate contributed data. We hope that this tool will be helpful to those seeking to better understand cost and time needed for potential projects.

What improvements will the Cost Calculator 2.0 bring? It will allow you to input salary/wage/benefit information for up to four people and assign each process being performed to a  particular person. It also allows you to designate a percentage of the materials that each process will be performed on (for example, if you perform quality control on 10% of scans you can input this information and the output data will be adjusted accordingly). Lastly, it provides several local fields that you can use for processes not included in the calculator but for which you have local time data.

 
How will the data I submit be used?  The data you submit will be aggregated with all other data and displayed as part of an average on the results screen when people use the calculator. Your individual institutional  data will also be shown on the Notes About Data webpage. We show each contributor’s individual data on the Notes About Data webpage so that users of the calculator can get a feel for the wide variation in time and in practice from institution to institution. Seeing the data apart from the aggregate average  is also helpful if a user feels their situation is more similar to that of a particular institution.

A few points to note:

  • The processes and definitions document serves as guidelines for those submitting time data to the Digitization Cost Calculator. The definitions help clarify the meaning of specific fields and also help to further define the commonly used vocabulary for digital projects. The definitions serve as a common reference point for the digital library community in performing cost assessments for projects.
  • It is best to approach this document and the calculator with some basic understanding of digitization workflows. The Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) has been used as a basis for our definitions, where relevant, and is also a good source of information about digitization processes.

For questions please contact Joyce Chapman, [log in to unmask], 919-660-5889.

Thank you for your participation!

- Joyce Chapman, Kinza Masood, Chrissy Rissmeyer, and Dan Zellner (The Digital Library Federation Assessment Interest Group Cost Assessment committee)

***
Joyce Chapman
Assessment Coordinator
Duke University Libraries
919-660-5889 | [log in to unmask]

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