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2.2 Cost minimisation strategy

Selection of long-term preservation formats has a critical impact on the cost of providing access to records over a long-term.

Each long-term preservation format accepted increases the cost of providing access. Each format normally requires a separate program in order to display it. The worst case scenario is that this program must be implemented from scratch at considerable expense. But even if programs are commercially available, it is necessary to purchase copies of the program. Note that it is not just a matter of obtaining these programs once — as an archive’s systems change over time it will be necessary to replace these access programs periodically. At PROV we assume that this will be necessary every five years or so.

In addition to the cost of obtaining (and replacing) access programs, there is an ongoing cost in running these programs. This cost includes the cost of the hardware required to run the program and staff costs for installation, maintenance, and administration.

In the long-term it may be necessary to supersede a long-term preservation format. Typically this would occur if support for the original long-term preservation format was deemed to be too expensive and there was a suitable current format. Replacing a long-term preservation format requires a suitable conversion program. Such a conversion program is not simple, as it requires:

• monitoring to determine when the existing long-term preservation format is ceasing to be viable
• an evaluation, to determine an appropriate replacement format
• sourcing or writing of routines to perform the conversion
• identification of all instances of the superseded format in the collection
• conversion of all instances
• extensive testing to ensure that the conversion is accurate
• documentation of the conversion process.

Only the cost of the actual conversion step is dependent on the number of records to be converted. The cost of planning, testing, and documenting the conversion is largely independent of the number of records converted. To be more precise, the one-off cost of planning, testing, and documenting the conversion is amortised over the records converted, and hence is lower the more records there are in that format. For this reason, it makes economic sense to minimise the number of formats held in an archive. This reduces the number of formats that may need to be converted, and increases the number of records in that format.

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