Sustainability

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OVERVIEW

In the context of digital content, sustainability has two interdependent strands. At a strategic level, there must be a clear business plan in place which identifies how an institution intends to integrate the service into its collection development plans and what revenue models will be employed to do so. At a practical level there must be a clear preservation plan to ensure the technical sustainability and long-term access of the digitised materials. Both elements will need to be thought through at the outset of any digital content project or programme.

Ithaka five key factors

There are no hard and fast rules for success. Every project has its own set of circumstances and there is no 'one size fits all' model, but at the heart of a good sustainability plan are a number of key principles. Work on business models and sustainability has been undertaken for the Strategic Content Alliance by Ithaka through a multi-year investigation of innovative funding models to sustain digital projects. Their report Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today identifies five key factors essential for the ongoing success and sustainability of digital initiatives in not-for-profit sectors:

Dedicated and entrepreneurial leadership

Managing a digital project requires not just an intimate knowledge of the primary content area, but also an appetite for leading staff, planning for long-term costs and revenues, and making sometimes difficult strategic decisions about the future of the resource.

Craft a strong value proposition

Developing a rich understanding of the likely users of your resource and the content that will be most valuable to them – keeping in mind that the pool may be larger than those in your immediate field, and that they may interact with content in different and unexpected ways online than they would in print – can help focus your efforts, keeping in mind that the value proposition of your digital content may be different for different audiences.

Minimise direct costs

There are many ways to lower direct costs of a digital project, from outsourcing elements of work, to establishing beneficial partnerships, to engaging volunteer support. In some cases, sharing costs across other departments and units within the institution can help; while this can be an effective approach, this practice may obscure the true costs of your project, and possibly put that support at risk should those contributed efforts get cut.

Develop diverse revenue sources

There are a number of earned revenue models for digital public sector resources; perhaps the most common is subscriptions, usually to institutions but sometimes to individuals as well. Other options may include advertising, sponsorship, licensing, sales or a combination of these. Project leaders may need to think about ways to balance the mission of their institution with the project’s need to generate revenue, by carefully differentiating offerings and the audiences to whom those offerings are targeted.

Clear accountability and metrics for success

Setting clear goals and targets that your project has to meet – both in terms of developing an audience and in meeting financial goals – can help create the conditions for success. While some measures may be common for all institutions (the ability of the project to cover some percentage of its costs through earned revenue), others may fit the broader mission of the specific institution (for example, enhancing the institution’s reputation in the field of the resource). Whatever these metrics are, it is important for project leaders to think about how to achieve them and how to communicate them to institutional administrators and other stakeholders in the project.

Additional principles

Plan early

There are a number of practical aspects which need to be thought through as part of the business plan. These include the kind of financial models which will provide the necessary budget to keep things going and being clear about what tasks are needed to sustain the content and develop it. It is not enough to cover operating costs; projects need to generate capital for ongoing reinvestment in their content and/or technology if they are to grow and thrive. It is essential to think ahead to the future uses of the resource: will the collection be simply maintained or will it continue to be developed? Might it be integrated into another resource or repurposed, perhaps to meet the needs of a new audience?

Understand your audience

Time spent at the outset of a project on understanding the audience who will use the content and what their needs are is time well spent as it will help focus long-term planning on what users value rather than on the values of the organisation.

Use appropriate standards

Being flexible and imaginative during the content creation process whilst always using appropriate technical standards will help to make sure that options for the future are kept open and that content can safely be preserved and re-used with confidence. To assist in future data migration, resources should be designed so that their individual components are distinct and detachable. In other words, each component can be updated, altered or removed without interfering with another part of the system.

Maintain documentation

Careful documentation of all aspects of the project (systems and processes, workflow methodology, standards, schemas, formats, other technical details) and keeping itup to date is fundamental as it provides ongoing management information for staff responsible for the resource.

Experiment

Flexibility, willingness to experiment and an entrepreneurial spirit on the part of the project team is crucial. Engaging in a recurring process of trying new things and adapting plans to fit lessons learned is critical to longer-term success.

The above two sections are taken from the Ithaka report and are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works Unported Licence 3.0

IPR and licensing

An element of sustainability may include income generation through the sale of licensed content such as images or sound recordings. It will be important to have a policy statment on IPR and licensing for the institution and be clear about any rights management and terms and conditions of use. The following advice papers from the IPR and licensing toolkit may be useful:

Draft Institutional IPR Policy Statements

Rights Management Template

Template Terms and Conditions of Service

Sources of advice and guidance

JISC Digital Media

JISC Digital Media is a JISC Advisory Service, which provides advice, guidance and training to the UK's Further and Higher Education community on creating and managing digital media resources specifically still images, moving images and sound resources. This includes sustainability of digital collections a helpful advice sheet offering an overview of different approaches to sustainability and practical steps projects can take to finance a digital collection beyond the life of the project.

Ithaka Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources

The Ithaka suite of products provides advice and guidance on sustainability prepared for the Strategic Content Alliance and includes a range of materials. Ithaka S+R is a strategic consulting and research service that focuses on the transformation of scholarship and teaching in an online environment, with the goal of identifying the critical issues facing the academic community and acting as a catalyst for change.

Two reports Sustainability and revenue models for online academic resources and Sustaining Digital Resources: an on-the-ground view of projects today take a broad look the issues surrounding the mechanisms for pursuing sustainability in not-for-profit projects. Whilst the focus is on online academic resources (OARs), projects whose primary aim is to make content and scholarly discourse available on the web for research, collaboration, and teaching, the advice and guidance is transferrable across the public sector and beyond. A range of revenue models is identified and described, supported in the second report by illustrative case studies. From these reports, briefing papers for digital project managers and staff in a range of public sector domains have been prepared as useful starting points on the topic.

Peer review workshop materials

Two peer review workshops were held to discuss the Ithaka reports on Sustainability. A blog report is available that details the discussions from the London event, while Kevin Guthrie's notes from Ithaka's New York session include a list of next steps that were identified for research or concrete measures that would advance sustainability.

In March 2009, a workshop exploring business models and case studies for sustainability was held in London.

JISC Sustainability Handbook

The draft JISC Sustainability Handbook provides advice and guidance to all JISC-funded projects and programmes on how it is expected that they will approach sustainability both for individual projects and across JISC programmes. Emphasis is placed on the importance of the synthesis of outcomes across programmes so that all may benefit from the lessons learned, and on the path from development to service.

Further information

Reproduction charging models; rights policy for digital images in American art museums

Waters, Donald J. Building on success: forging new gound, the question of sustainability.First Monday, Volume 9, Number 5 - 3 May 2004

Kaufman. On building a new market for culture., JISC, 2009.

[[Role::newcomer]] [[Role::strategy manager]] [[Role::policy maker]] [[Role::project manager]]
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