> I was wondering if there is an established formula 
> for calculating the rough cost per record.  
> 
> Thanks,
> Catherine Dean

By far the biggest cost in any digitisation project is the cost of the staff to undertake it. It can be an immensely time-consuming process, and we found that it was only possible using dedicated staff hired for the purpose. The cost in time and money of managing such a project should not be underestimated.

I don't know how useful this will be, but in the UK SCRAN has used a figure of £25.25 (just under $40 at the exchange rate as I write) as the amount they gave for the creation of a "digitised asset" (that is, a digital image plus accompanying metadata). In our projects we found this was sufficient not only to cover the costs of photography and digitisation of images, audio and video, but also to cover the staffing costs -- though of course that depends how much you pay the staff -- as well as buy them the PCs to work on. We're currently undertaking two projects which will produce some 13,000 "multimedia resources", 80 education packs and 6 web site essays, funded by grants totalling £473,000 ($747,000), and employing 11 people. The project timescale is 18 months.

We separated photography from digitisation, using professional conventional slide photography for objects and copying. The slides were then digitised by a commercial company. Costs are currently running at about £6 ($9.50) for photography and £1.30 ($2) for digitisation and delivery on CD. Sound and video digitisation was somewhat more expensive, but costs have come down recently.

Pete
-- 
Peter M Gray
Museums Officer


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