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The preservation
assessment process creates new, additional metadata to manage. The value of
that metadata depends on whether the efficiency it brings to the preservation
process outweighs the cost of creating and managing it over time. The costs
of managing the assessment metadata we generated are currently unknown. The
quantity of assessment metadata is relatively small, so the cost of their
physical storage is not an immediate concern. However, maintaining the
infrastructure to support the methodology is more daunting; it requires a
complex layer of management that includes ongoing technology watch, format
research, policy maintenance and possibly deposit agreement re-negotiations.
Perhaps a federated approach to some of this activity, as a service to a
community of repositories and their users, would be most economical. In any
case, the costs to be borne are not inconsequential. And yet there are a
number of ways in which the assessment data can inform decisions to be made
at different points in the preservation cycle, and it is conceivable that, if
used effectively, the data’s value in the decision-making process offsets or
exceeds the cost to create and maintain it.
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