Cost Calculator
New Cost Model
In 2013 HathiTrust will be moving to a new cost model that will distribute the costs of sustaining the repository in a way that more accurately reflects the benefits each partner receives from the preserved collections. The new model will also allow institutions to join HathiTrust that wish to participate in the curation and management of the repository in return for specialized services, but do not necessarily have digital content to contribute. Such institutions are able to join HathiTrust under the new model effectively immediately, and interested parties are invited to contact us at hathitrust-info@umich.edu. Details of the new model are available at http://www.hathitrust.org/documents/hathitrust-cost-rationale-2013.pdf. For partners who are contributing content to HathiTrust, the following model will continue be in effect through 2012:
General costs
HathiTrust partners pay the infrastructure costs for the content they deposit. The infrastructure is made up of five elements: storage, data centers, tape backup, servers and miscellaneous hardware, and staff to oversee and maintain these elements. To determine costs for specific amounts of content, each element is converted into a per GB cost. The per GB costs are then added together to calculate a total per GB per year cost. This total cost includes one storage replacement cycle (e.g. storage that was purchased in year 1 is replaced in year 4 to prevent loss of data). It also includes the costs of storage and maintenance at two redundant storage locations (one at the University of Michigan and one at Indiana University). Partners are billed on an annual basis and adjustments to the charges are made the following year. Because planning is made around projected needs, we may not be able to accommodate an amount of content that is significantly more than projected.
One-time fee
In each year that new content is deposited, a one-time fee for that content is charged. This one-time fee goes toward building a pool of funds that the HathiTrust partners can use in case of one-time resource-intensive need such as migrating all content or moving to a new storage platform.
Cost Calculator
This calculator is provided as a means of understanding the costs associated with depositing content in HathiTrust. The values it produces are as accurate as we can be at this time, but final costs would be determined and enumerated in a partner contract.
