medium-term period, such as five years, and to use the knowledge gained in that timeframe to

inform more accurate estimates of long-term costs. However, there is always likely to be a
problem in estimating the costs of long-term actions that are still unclear, such as migration
costs.

Some costs do become much easier to predict following a few years' experience in collecting
material, preparing it for storage, and protecting it.

Some cost assumptions can be reasonably made:

Development costs are likely to be high, depending on how ambitious the programme
is from the start. Systems design is a necessary investment in the long run but it can be
a significant set up cost
There are obvious recurrent costs associated with staff, accommodation, energy
supplies, network use, telecommunications costs, storage media such as disks and
tapes, and consumables. Although often funded as capital expenditure, equipment and
software should be seen as recurrent costs because they will have to be replaced on a
regular basis
The staff costs of working with producers can be high because of the need to address
new issues with each change in technology. The costs of negotiating rights may vary
depending on the complexity of rights ownership and on whether or not rights need to
be purchased
The costs of identifying and selecting materials for preservation are likely to be low
per unit, but there may be many units. A non-selective approach may reduce costs,
although adding to long-term preservation costs overall, as more material must be
stored, processed, preserved and organised for access. Human judgments about
selection are expensive where labour costs are high; automating decisions may reduce
costs if the high set-up costs can be spread over a large amount of material, and if it is
feasible to automate what are often complex human judgments
The costs of collecting or transferring materials are likely to be low per unit but large
programmes may generate significant transfer costs overall. This may incorporate high
transmission costs where automated gathering searches and downloads large amounts
of data. The cost of quality control checking is likely to be high unless it can be
automated
Converting material to a restricted range of standard formats may be inexpensive if the
conversion is easy, but expensive if individual handcrafting or correction is needed.
However, there may be considerable long-term cost benefits in being able to deal with
a restricted range of formats
The costs of describing material and adding metadata are likely to be high because of
the amount of information to be recorded, and the difficulty of finding it in some
cases. Costs could be greatly reduced by producers using more standardised structures
and creating good metadata and documentation themselves. For heavily standardised
formats such as those widely used for archival versions of images and audio, costs will
be reduced by automated gathering of metadata from files and during production
processes
Costs associated with storage are theoretically low and decreasing, but in total they

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