In Search of a Model: 25 Years Calculating the Costs of Digital Preservation

Cost calculation is one of the aspects of long-term digital preservation that is still awaiting resolution. Knowing how much it costs to preserve a package of archival information in the long term is an aspiration that has arisen since the interested community, at the end of the last century, began to consider the binomial permanent preservation applied to the digital ecosystem. The objective of the work is to analyze the different models for calculating the costs developed in the 25 years between 1998, date of the first theoretical approach and 2023. To do this, an exhaustive review of the literature has been carried out, together with the study of the project websites. The result has been obtaining a diagnosis on the viability of these models, the latest proposals still in development, which allows us to highlight the aspects pending resolution to clear the horizon of long-term digital preservation.

Keywords
Cost Calculation; Modeling; Digital Preservation