title: Developing Costing Models for Emulation Based Access in Scientiﬁc Libraries
abstract: Digital preservation practitioners are beginning to answer questions about the costs related to the long-term availability of digital information. In order to successfully model these costs archival systems and workﬂows need to be fully understood and their costs identiﬁed. This can become exceedingly diﬃcult for complex access and preservation strategies like emulation. If emulation is to be considered in a strategy mix its cost components need to be gathered and understood so that institutions can develop informed preservation plans and decide which strategy to follow. The digital preservation community now has a systematic understanding of storage and repository administration costs, but emulation and surrounding services are still an emerging topic for memory institutions. While costs to produce bitpreservable representations of digital artefacts are relatively well known there is an array of rather unpredictable cost factors that need to be further researched. Many of these unexplored costs factors vary depending on the kind of digital objects and the objectives of the stakeholders involved in the activities.