LIFE3 Costing Model (LIFE3)
- Creator and Funding
- Developed University College London (UCL) and British Library (BL) and funded by Jisc and Research Information Network.
- Status
- The LIFE project ended in 2010.
- Purpose
- To improve the ability of organisations to plan and manage the preservation of digital assets by giving a content neutral view of the digital lifecycle from the perspective of the preserving organisation. In LIFE1 and LIFE 2 the purpose was to estimate the life-cycle cost of preservation activites to aid decision making and budgeting.
- Information assets
- Websites, e-journals, digitised newspapers, sound, word processing documents, small databases.
- Activities
- Production (creation/digitisation), Pre-Ingest (acquisition), Ingest, Data Management, Archival Storage, Preservation Planning, Administration.
- Resources
- Capital (storage media), labour (5 levels).
- Time
- Past, Present, Future up to 100 years.
- Variables
- Retention period, number of items, types of items, migration (strategy, frequency, coverage, automation rate), organisation size.
- Type of tool
- Analysis, estimate. The tool is implemented in a MS Excel spreadsheet and in a prototype web version.
- Availability of tool
- Documentation and a predicting costing tool is available for download. A prototype web tool is also available online.
Further reading
- Hole, B., Wheatley, P., Lin, L., McCann, P. and Aitken, B, The Life3 Predictive Costing Tool for Digital Collections, in New Review of Information Networking, Volume 15, Issue 2, 2010.
- Hole, B., Lin, L., McCann, P., and Wheatley, P., LIFE3: A Predictive Costing Tool for Digital Collections, in Proceedings of iPRES 2010, 7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, Austria, 2010.
- Watson, J., The LIFE project research review – Mapping the landscape, riding a life cycle, 2005.
- Wheatley, P and Hole, B., LIFE3: Predicting Long Term Digital Preservation Costs, in iPRES 2009, September 2009.
