I've been pondering this a lot lately. We're starting from the ground up on a
concerted digital asset management effort after years of one-off solutions.
When I arrived, I inherited piles of CDs and DVDs, things stashed on servers
all over the place, etc.
I am now implementing a digital asset management system (ResourceSpace) to
start ordering all this, which will bly tie into our new collections management
system and new web content management system.
For the moment, I have written a script to copy the resource and preview assets
from ResourceSpace to a bucket on S3. (To save bandwidth/time I also used the
batch load capability to ship them a hard drive with about 500 GB of data a few
weeks ago.) So I now have two copies of all images: one protected by RAID on
our iSCSI storage box, and one theoretically spread across multiple data
centers at Amazon.
Ideally I'd like to have one other copy at one of our remote offices (either
online or offline), but that's for the future.
I'm not sure we've entirely come to terms with the long term cost of preserving
the material. We're buying enough local storage to get through our grant-funded
ramp-up. After that replacing/adding drives and servers is going to have to be
considered as much of a preservation/conservation expense as replacing the a
leaky roof. But it's a relatively new expense (or at least orders of magnitude
bigger than it has been for other data systems) so it's something we're going
to have to educate people on.
-David Dwiggins
Historic New England
__
David Dwiggins
Systems Librarian/Archivist, Historic New England
141 Cambridge Street, Boston, MA 02114
(617) 227-3956 x 242
ddwiggins [at] historicnewengland.org ( mailto:ddwigg...@historicnewengland.org
)
http://www.historicnewengland.org ( http://www.historicnewengland.org/ )
Jimmy Ghaphery jghap...@vcu.edu 8/27/2009 1:37 PM
We have a historic idea of what it means to maintain space for analog
collections. For many institutions a lot of that initial funding has
come from capital building funds. While the technological solutions are
not clear to me at this point (and I'm benefiting from this thread on
that), I am not sure if this won't turn into more of a long-term
business problem.
Has anyone been able to give a projection to their management on what
the total cost per TB is for preservation over even a short horizon of
10 years?
--Jimmy
--
Jimmy Ghaphery
Head, Library Information Systems
VCU Libraries
http://www.library.vcu.edu
--
Visit http://www.LymanEstate.org for information on renting the historic Lyman
Estate for your next event - a very special place for very special occasions.
