This being presented by Jacqueline Cook from Goldsmiths. Sherpa-LEAP was a project to setup institutional repositories to hold published research output at a number of University of London colleges. The case study covers Royal Holloway, Goldsmiths and UCL.

Because of the relative ‘youth’ of the repositories, the major costs were staffing, and the main processes were Acquisition, Ingest and Metadata Creation.

The costs were calculated based on the amount of time spent on each item. Interestingly there are some institution specific variations – Goldsmiths have high ingest costs because of the variety of material submitted. Royal Holloway have high acquisitions costs because they included the costs of holding outreach events (not cleaer that they costed in the time of the academics attending these – sounds like just the cost of the repository staff to run them)

The overall costs for each institution varied considerably:

• Goldsmiths
• Year 1 – 31.48
• Year 5 – 31.95
• Year 10 – 32.22

And UCL coming in at approximately half these figures, with Royal Holloway in the middle. Clearly these are estimates. Jacqueline is suggesting that the more complex nature of the objects accepted at Goldsmiths which had a large impact on the variation in costs across the institutions. Along side this there were also:

• Different use cases
• Phases in development of repositories
• What was considered as part or outside the lifecycle
• Method of deposit
• Staffing levels

Overall the case study observed that:

• We are working in a fast-changing environment
• There are limitation of a simple, per-object average
• Metadata Quality Assurance might be needed as an element (although noted that Metadata creation is actually part of Ingest, although the model treats it as a separate element)
• Object-related advocacy – there may need to be an advisory role for repository administration
• We are at an early stage for preservation planning