The Cost of Inaction

We all know that budgets are tight and it’s not always easy to integrate preservation work, especially when it comes to multimedia. However, failing to implement a preservation and/or conservation strategy can have its own costs. To help determine what that cost is, as well as to help prioritize collections, AVPreserve has developed the Cost of Inaction Calculator (COI Calculator).

While AVPreserve is a firm that works with institutions to help them better manage, use, distribute, and preserve their media assets and metadata, "they have developed the COI Calculator as a free tool to help users analyze multimedia collections and make more educated decisions about what to digitize, what to perform lower levels of preservation on, and what to leave in its native state. According to their site, the COI Calculator "helps organizations analyze the implications of varying levels of preservation action when dealing with legacy audiovisual collections. COI adds a data point to ROI, or Return on Investment, and helps articulate what stands to be lost or gained in terms of access, intellect and finances based on different scenarios around digitization, physical storage, digital storage, and media longevity." To help explain the goals of the Cost of Inaction Calculator, they have put together a short video that can be viewed here.