The Cost of Digital Preservation: A Methodological Analysis

Digital preservation is a challenging topic. Its exponential increasing in the last decade has gone faster than the advance on standards and tools to manage it. The cost of digital preservation is still a non-developed matter. Thus, the objective of this paper is to apply a cost accounting methodology to design a model applicable to digital preservation. We contribute to knowledge in a double sense: by the application of a cost accounting design methodology to a high-tech activity, and by the design of a proposal of cost model to calculate the cost of digital preservation.