Seven European countries have announced that they are launching 4C (the Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation). The aim is to help public and private European organisations invest more effectively in digital curation and preservation, sustaining the long-term value of all types of digital information.
Curation is seen to ensure digital objects remain understandable, accessible, useable and safe over time. 4C will provide practical guidance to help organisations estimate the cost of digital curation work and demonstrate the long and short term benefits.
4C is described as 'open and social'. Rather than waiting for perfect and polished results, users will be blogging and sharing findings as they go. It is hoped that this will encourage debate and increase the likelihood that their findings and guidance are useful.
Apart from bringing together a fragmented research landscape, the project will create an online 'curation costs exchange' which will help users to model their costs. This will help predict more accurately the sorts of costs and benefits that are likely to result from the decision to preserve. This is projected to be useful for managers in major archives and data centres, and support preservation planning functions. These tools will be particularly useful for policy-makers concerned about long-term access to data, it is stated. In addition, the project will publish a roadmap for future work in modelling costs which will help to clarify the areas which need more support.
The partners involved are Danish National Archives (Denmark), DANS - Data Archiving and Network Service (Netherlands), Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (Germany), Digital Curation Centre (UK), Digital Preservation Coalition (UK), Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (UK), Institute for Information Systems and Computing Research (Portugal), Jisc (UK), Keep Solutions (Portugal), National Library of (Estonia), Royal Library of Denmark (Denmark), Secure Business (Austria), UK Data Archive (UK).
The project will be inviting people to workshops and focus groups during the next two years, and organise a conference to share its results at the end of the process.
