Flickr CC image by Mukumbra
One of the key outputs of the LIFE-SHARE Project was the case study at the University of Leeds: a cost comparison of physical conservation versus digital preservation. We analysed a sample of 200 monographs – French texts, dating from between 1890 and 1970, many of which were printed on acid paper.
Our findings were that destructive digitisation – which is to say digitising without applying a high level of handling restrictions, and disposing of the books afterwards – was the most cost-effective way of preserving the sample over time. This is despite the fact that it was many hundred percent more expensive than physical conservation in the first instance; once storage costs were factored in.
Clearly this method would not be applicable to collections whose books have intrinsic value, but it will certainly be a useful finding to inform future preservation strategy.
LIFE-SHARE links:
- Preservation Case Study summary online
- Full internal report on the case study, in PDF format
- LIFE-SHARE blog post on cost comparisons
Mar 25, 2011 @ 16:49:49
I’ve enjoyed the 10 days so far, and I read the LIFE-SHARE Leeds study a couple of months ago. While I was pleased to see the hard numbers on various preservation strategies, I was very surprised to see document people talking about throwing away the originals, and ‘destructive digitisation’, I thought it was only audiovisual archives that were losing their originals, and even that is forced upon us, not pure choice. So it was surprising — and sobering — to see discussion of getting rid of manuscripts after digitisation. Have you had much feedback on your results? I’m surprised it hasn’t caused an uproar.
Mar 26, 2011 @ 10:18:35
Hi Richard, thanks for commenting.
We’ve not had any uproar so far, certainly! But the first thing is to say, we’re not neccessarily advocating destructive digitisation – we’ve just gone away and done the maths to see what is cost efficient over time. The Leeds Case Study came about because we have collections in need of preservation, and we need to be able to make an informed decision about how we approach this – but that’s not say any procedures have been put in place to make destructive digitisation the norm. The findings of the case study are still very much just part of an on-going discussion.
But the other thing is, something has to give. We just can’t keep storing all these books forever. At Leeds I believe we add around 700 metres of shevling’s worth of new books per year – without expanding our premises, that means a lot of books have to go in order to make room for the 25,000+ orders each year. As it says in the blog post above, clearly this policy would only work under specific cicumstances – the books having no intrinsic value as objects, they’d have to be out of copyright, there would have to be other physical examples known of at other institutions so we wouldn’t be destroying something unique, and the content would have to be of enough interest to warrant digitising in the first place – so it isn’t something that could ever really apply to a valuable manuscript, for example. But perhaps in certain situations it may be an acceptable way forward?
Whatever we decide, and the other White Rose institutions decide, and the wider community decides, we felt it was important to do some serious leg work and try and predict the costings and trends, so we have a better idea of the impact our decisions will have 10, 20, 50, 100 years down the line.