Managing Digitization Activities · 113
University of Connecticut
Policy Statement on Cost Recovery for Grant-funded
Partnership Projects with Digital Collections at the UConn
Libraries
Drafted by the Digital Collections Facilitation Team Approved by Leadership Council on June 4, 2003.
Background
The Libraries seek to make its expertise and services available to projects that enhance its mission and its
collections. While seeking to partner with university departments and external institutions on bringing
digital collections to the Web, it is important to recognize that there are costs for the Libraries associated
with these collections. We recognize that there is little value in creating a model of charging back to
university departments for personnel and fixed-cost expenditures such as software maintenance and
hardware amortization. However, the contributions of the Libraries must be reflected in grant application
budgets and in working with institutions external to the university.
Policy
The Libraries bear real costs in the development and maintenance of digital projects. In particular, there
are three costs that need to be considered:
1. Personnel: a percentage of someone's time for maintenance of the interface and software
components for upgrades, etc.
2. Server support: cost for maintenance of the software, server, and amortized cost of server
replacement
3. Data storage/delivery: cost for the amount of disk space consumed as a measure of the project's
size. There are no delivery costs (e.g. per megabyte delivered by the system). There are also no
costs associated with the indexing structures.
As of the time this document was last revised, those costs include the following:
1. $780 for 1% of staff FTE per year (24 hours/yr) which should include the maintenance of the
underlying system and application developer time for interface development, consulting, etc.
2. $100 per year for a portion of software and server maintenance and hardware upgrade costs
3. $50 per gigabyte of information loaded into the system
In recognition of partnerships with other university departments, the University Libraries does not assess
the personnel costs associated with projects except in extreme circumstances. When drafting budgets for
grants departments are expected to include all library costs as part of the grant.
Previous Page Next Page