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Not the book by George Perec but actually a costing model for digital preservation developed by the British Library. LIFE, (Life Cycle Information for E-Literature) is a collaboration between University College London (UCL) and the British Library. The Project has developed a methodology to model the digital lifecycle and calculate the costs of preserving digital information for the next 5, 10 or 100 years. For the first time, organisations can apply this process and plan effectively for the preservation of their digital collections.

Currently the LIFE Project is in its second phase (“LIFE²”), an 18 month project running from March 2007 to August 2008. LIFE tries to develop a costing model which can identify costs at each stage, 1 year, 10 years and 100 years. It wants to show the long term consequences of accessioning collections and can be used for curatorial decisions.

The event was kicked off by Helen Shenton, who asked us not to crack any more Second Life jokes, and introduced us all to LIFE and its evolution. To read more, have a look here.

Paul Courant of the University of Michigan gave a keynote speech and noted how history ‘gets longer by the minute’. He noted that market forces may drive preservation for a while but that material which is seen as unmarketable will not be taken care of, in crude economic terms. It is vitally important that people who control resources understand how important digital preservation is.

Throughout the day we heard case studies from national institutions in Denmark and the British Library, as well as the newspaper project within the British Library. All of them had used LIFE and gave feedback regarding their experience with it. Some thought it would be useful to use OAIS terms to ease understanding and communication and would like to see a breakdown in some of the generic functional entities. One case study involving film noted that it would be more economical to preserve film in digital format as opposed to 105 mm films. Professor Bo-Christer Björk who was asked to check the model related that he didn’t identify any significant flaws with the methodology of LIFE. He hoped that convergence of a few file formats would, in the future, reduce costs. He could see how very rare formats could create high costs in the long run.

Paul Ayris of UCL questioned whether libraries should, instead of pulling readers into their institutions, be pushing material out to the public. He referred to the Blue Ribbon task force on substantial digital preservation and access (BRTF -SDPA) which he is involved in. Launched by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Task Force’s two-year mission is to develop a viable economic sustainability strategy to ensure that today’s data will be available for further use, analysis and study. Members will convene a broad set of international experts from the academic, public and private sectors who will participate in quarterly discussion panels. The group will then publish two substantial reports with their findings, including a final report in late 2009 that will include a set of actionable recommendations for digital preservation.

LIFE seems to be workable; however, costing takes time, evidence for costing takes time to gather, and it appears to work best within national institutions and Institutional Repositories where preservation priorities have been clearly stated; and there must be a stable budget.

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