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Hello. I'm Mel Collier.
I'm the library director of
the Catholic University
of Leuven in Belgium.
And my talk is about
the Economic Issues
and the Business
Planning of digital libraries.
It's all about sustainability,
and by that we mean
developing services
for the long term,
and often we mean moving from
a project stage into
a service stage.
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Compared to the
wealth of literature
on many aspects of
digital libraries,
such as technical issues,
copyright, legal issues,
user studies, design,
the literature and the published
body of information on
business issues and economics
is really quite limited still.
However, in recent
years a few books have
been published and some
articles on the subject.
If we look at what
people are saying
about economics and
business issues,
here are a few examples.
In 1997, so long
ago, Michael Lesk,
one of the big figures in
digital libraries worldwide,
said economics is definitely
not a solved problem.
Then I myself in 2004,
after as part of
a research project into an
early European project,
I said that many digital
library projects are
started without much attention
to the business issues.
Then Michael Lesk, again
in a publication in 2004,
said economics is emphatically
not a solved problem.
Then David Baker asked in
a publication in 2006,
do we have a true understanding
of digital library developments?
By that he did mean
the economic environment in
which digital libraries operate.
The Chief Executive of
the British Library,
Lynne Brindley,
in a book edited
by Baker in 2009,
said, no one really knows how
the economic and business
models will emerge.
Derrick Law, the
editor in chief of
this series, said in 2009,
in the same publication,
we know the price of
electronic content,
but almost nothing about the
total cost of ownership.
In order to talk about this,
