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Sustainability of digital libraries: economic issues and business planning

Published on December 30, 2012   62 min
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0:00
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,

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