ETD: total cost of ownership – collecting, archiving and providing access

The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study of total cost of ownership (TOC) for Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD). Only few articles have been published to discuss the costs associated with repository and/or theses and dissertations (TD).

The paper first provides literature reviews in costs associated with repository and TD. By using the DCC life cycle model, the author presents costs for each actionable category: create or receive, appraise & select, ingest, preservation action, store, access, use and reuse and transform. The paper presents four TOCs to illustrate the changes of TOCs from 2005 to current time.

The paper gives one case study of the TOCs for ETD over the years, and illustrates how the University lowered the TOCs. The current ETD's TOC is on a par with these costs of two other studies published related to repository titles. The TOC has been decreased from the traditional paper-based TD of $75 per title to ETD of $69 in 2005. By removing the ProQuest processing fee of $55, the TOC decreased to $14.37 in 2010. The TOC is currently $6.33 per title after the ETD collection was migrated to the University of Arizona repository.

Readers shall be aware that there are no “transform” and little “preservation action” tasks performed. The current cost of “transform” is $0 due to the nature of ETD of its rigid format requirements,

The paper fulfills the need to study costs associated with repository titles, especially ETD titles. It also provide a way to estimate costs for institutions planning to start ETD collections.