I attached a PDF of the breakdown of costs to fully resource centralized
digital library services hosting for the state university system and state
college system in Florida about 10 years ago (journal publishing platform,
federated search platform, archival finding aids hosting, digital library
hosting, digital preservation system). The PDF is long, partly because of
several appendixes. The actual report on costs is 35 pages with the table
showing breakdown of costs at page 17 and the 35 page report going into
what each platform was used for and how many institutions used it. It also
has the breakdown of costs with FTE employee support and server costs.
There are 2 economies of scale that come into play when running software.
1st, when you have staffing to support one platform, that can cost the same
as to support several platforms. Employees are the biggest cost. Ideally,
you would want more than one programmer for stability and to be able to
cross train. Once there is a functional team, that team can support
multiple tools, and reducing to one tool and one employee would be unstable
because of not being able to do cross training. 2nd, once you have a
platform up and running, adding additional libraries to be able to use that
platform or additional content to the platform doesn't raise the cost
hardly at all. Much of the cost is in the platform existing, and then
another piece of content or another use is a comparatively small cost.
(Admittedly, operating very large software platforms at scale is different
than operating small installs, and every once in a while addressing the
scale will require overcoming unique challenges.)
Best,
-Wilhelmina
Wilhelmina Randtke
Head of Libraries Technologies and Systems
Zach S. Henderson Library
1400 Southern Dr.
Statesboro, GA, 30458
(912) 478-5035
wrandtke_at_georgiasouthern.edu
On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 10:47 AM Abubakar Tidal <JTidal_at_citytech.cuny.edu>
wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was curious about your library web server budgets.
>
>
> * Do you self-host? How much would estimate the yearly cost is
> including labor/sys administration?
> * If you pay for hosting, how much would you estimate the yearly cost
> is to host your site?
> * Do you have a dedicated librarian or staff to manage the web server?
>
> Best,
>
> Abubakar R. Tidal, Jr. (he/him/his)
> Chief Librarian and Department Chair
> Ursula C. Schwerin Library
> New York City College of Technology, CUNY
> 300 Jay St.
> Library Building L544
> Brooklyn, NY 11201
>
> jtidal_at_citytech.cuny.edu
> https://library.citytech.cuny.edu
>
Received on Thu Sep 18 2025 - 09:49:15 EDT