JISC

Start date: 1 October 2004

End date: 1 September 2005

Funding programme: Digital Preservation and Records Management Programme

Project website: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/lifeproject/

JISC theme(s): Information environment, e-Administration

Introduction  

LIFE will explore and develop a life cycle approach to costing digital archiving for e-journals. After reviewing the existing state of knowledge, it will implement a number of methodologies to selected e-materials for the study. An international conference will be held to evaluate and validate the findings.   

Aims and Objectives

• A published Review of the existing life cycle literature
• Published case histories for use as exemplars by FE and HE libraries
• A published Report evaluating the success and findings of the project
• Conference presentations by the Project Officer and members of the Steering Group

The outcomes of the project are intended to answer the following Key Questions for Higher and Further Education:

• What are the long term costs of preserving digital material?
• Who is going to do it?
• What are the long term costs for a library in HE/FE to partner with another institution to carry out long term archiving?
• What are the comparative long term costs of a paper and digital copy of the same publication?
• At what point will there be sufficient confidence in the stability and maturity of digital preservation to switch from paper to digital for publications available in parallel formats?
• What are the relative risks of digital versus paper archiving?

Lead Institution

UCL (University College London) 

Project Partners

British Library 

Programme area(s) addressed:

1.   Institutional management support