Incidental versus structural costs
Theme: Economics
Indicator: Ratio of incidental versus structural costs of digital collections
Reference date: 31/08/2017 (Enumerate Core Survey 4)
Monitoring frequency: biennial
Institution types: museums, libraries, archives, other
Geographical scope: Europe
Costs of digital collections can be divided into incidental (upfront) costs and structural (ongoing) costs:
- 'Incidental costs' are defined as the costs having to do with the initial creation or acquisition of a digital collection. Examples are the selection of materials, acquisition of digital born materials, scanning, descriptive metadata creation, project management.
- 'Structural costs' are the costs needed for the ongoing maintenance, enhancement and preservation of a digital collection, for instance: activities concerning the preservation of digital collections, licenses, maintenance of web servers, user outreach and support, management.
The indicator allows institutions to compare the ratio of incidental versus structural costs for their own institution with the ratio in other institutions. On an aggregated scale it will show the development of this ratio in a heritage domain, country, or the EU as a whole.
About 52% of the costs are qualified as being incidental cost and the remainder are structural costs.
Trends in the ratio of incidental versus structural costs of digital collections
On the whole the results are very similar to the results for both Core Surveys where this was looked at.
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