Sustainability for Digitization Programs

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Sustainability for Digitization Programs

• January 20, 2006
• Laurie Gemmill
• ALA Mid-Winter

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Agenda

• Welcome and introductions
• Mini-workshop - Laurie Gemmill
• Sustainability Issues
• Business Planning
• Guiding Principles
• Needs Assessment and Evaluation
• Financial Plans
• Break
• Panel Discussion of Practice       
• Bettina Meyer - Western Michigan University
• Nancy Allen - Collaborative Digitization Program
• Geri Ingram - DiMeMa
• Q A - panel

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Thanks to Contributors

• Indebted to
• IMLS Web Wise 2005 Pre-Conference Workshop
  Business Planning for Digital Asset Management in
  Cultural Heritage Institutions, Feb 2005
• Business Planning for Cultural Heritage
  Institutions
• Authored by Liz Bishoff and Nancy Allen, January
  2004
• Published by Council on Library and Information
  Resources

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Sustainability

• Projects start with grant funding
• short term
• funding is intended as seed money or only used to
  fund innovative projects
• Projects to programs
• Projects limited in scope, self-contained
• Programs
• ongoing
• long-term strategic plan
• integrated into institutional workflow
• economically sustainable
• Ongoing projects not as competitive for funds

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Sustainability

• What is sustainability?
• What does it mean to be sustainable?
• Why it is so important to us?
• Particularly for digital and preservation
  initiatives?

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Sustainability - Definition

• Sustainability . . . refers to all the
  considerations that go into maintaining the
  institutional context for creation and
  maintenance of digital objects and resources, and
  supporting . . . long-term viability
• National Institute for Networked Cultural
  Heritage (2002)

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What Does It Mean To Be Sustainable?
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Sustainable Organizations

• Adapt to changing environments and client needs
• Develop independent, diversified and dependable
  sources of revenue
• Wean themselves from dependency on external funds
• Develop and grow programmatically

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Why Is Sustainability So Important For Digital
Initiatives?

• The investment of resources is greater
• The promise is greater
• The expectations are greater

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Sustainability Issues for Digital Cultural
Heritage Initiatives

• A Tale of Woe and Intrigue

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CLIR Survey - 2003

• Survey of Digital Cultural Heritage Initiatives
  and Their Sustainability Concerns
• To identify factors compromising sustainability
  among Digital Initiative (DIs)
• To develop recommendations on ways to counter
  these factors
• http//www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub118/contents.h
  tml

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Participants and Process

• 33 DCHIs a cross-section of the cultural
  community
• Performing arts organizations
• Scholarly and professional organizations
• Museum, archive and visual resource organizations
• Publishing groups
• Standards initiatives
• Humanities centers and projects
• 5 Funding Agencies
• Institute of Museum and Library Services
• National Endowment for the Humanities
• National Historical Publications and Records
  Commission
• Getty Grant program
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

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Woes

• The Economy 2003
• Domino effect
• Memberships, dues, fundraising
• Moratoriums setback to creativity
• Funding Trends and Dependencies
• Funding pool diminishing
• DCHI too dependent
• Serving master instead of mission
• Digital Initiatives as Organizational Projects
• Special projects rather than programs

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Woes

• Missions and Overlapping Domains
• Passion projects
• Outdated or changing missions
• Lack of Standards, Practices, and Preservation
• Huge editing and integration costs
• Risk of Obsolescence
• Unproven Business Models
• Various models

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Woes

• Growing Pains
• Transition periods high stress
• Internal Tensions
• Lack of clarity
• Competition with other programs/projects
• Staff changes
• Uncertain Market Needs
• Absence of user needs

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Recommendations

• Planning
• Training
• Repositories for digital assets

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Intrigue the Secrets to Sustainability

• Create a product (digital initiative) worth
  sustaining
• Develop well-defined programs with discrete
  objectives and measurable goals
• Continually reassess your organization and its
  programs

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Business Planning Overview
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Business Planning

• A business plan is a high-level description of
  how an organization will implement its strategic
  plan, for the organization as a whole or from the
  perspective of a specific project or product
  Planning Process (Bryson, 1995)

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Business Planning

• Before start a project, program or product
• Process of determining costs, expectations and
  financial goals
• What are the financial expectations?
• Make revenue?
• Support project?
• ???
• Parallels to grant writing
• Components
• Experience

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Business Planning

• Cultural heritage repositories/Non profits do
  many aspects of business planning
• The natural outgrowth of organizational planning
  process
• Early days digitization explored technology
  today used to advance mission/goals
• Need to incorporate at beginning
• No single recipe for success

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Partnerships

• Collaboration increasingly common element of
  sustainability strategy, particularly for digital
  initiatives
• Funders strongly encourage
• Can leverage funding
• Show governmental bodies and others
• CHI work with community for greater good
• Higher profile for all involved

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Successful Partnerships

• The key is to find a compelling shared goal with
  real added value and to orient the partnership
  and its opportunity seeking activities around
  it.
• University of Washington and Eastern Washington
  Historical Society
• UW - expertise in scanning and metadata,
  technology
• EWHS - expertise on Plateau Indians, selection
  and marketing
• Consortial digitization endeavors
• Museum Online Archives of California (MOAC)
• CDP (Colorado Digitization Program)
• Ohio Memory

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Environmental Scanning

• Knowing about
• Economic
• Social
• Technological
• Environmental
• General business trends
• Examples
• Amount of leisure time available for cultural
  heritage visits
• Families are having fewer children

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Models for Sustainability

• Subsidy
• For specific period or long term support
• Support from operating funds
• Understood to contribute to overall institutions
  sustainability
• University of Michigan
• Supported by library funds, grants, and revenue
  sources
• Grants (foundation government)
• Self sustaining
• Nebraska Historical Society Digital Imaging Lab
• Generate own funding to support staff and
  infrastructure
• Combination
• Begin with subsidy or grant funding, supplemented
  in other ways

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Identifying a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

• Services or programs of highest quality available
• Most reasonably prices services/programs
• Most experienced staff
• Most variety of services offered
• Most highly endorsed services or programs
• Barry McLeish Successful Marketing Strategies
  for Non Profit Organizations, 1995, 31

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Identify a Competitive Advantage

• You need to build new revenue streams
• Need to be creative but follow mission
• Digitization Examples
• Facilitating photo-duplication
• sell images?
• Digitization lab
• cost recovery
• Licensing

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Mission, Vision, Values, Goals Your Guiding
Principals
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Guiding Principles

• Mission or Vision Statements
• Values
• Goals

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McCarter Field Museums Four Tasks

• Continue to believe in the strength of our core
  missions
• Know how generation X, Y, and now Z use
  information and what they expect
• Lead our businesses not only responding to change
  but also anticipating change
• Take seriously the challenge of information
  overload

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Museum Institutional Trajectory

• 21st Century
• Focused on
• Interdisciplinary
• Educational Tools
• Engagement (stories)
• Layered (multimedia)
• Inside Out
• Transforming
• RELEVANT
• Bill Barnett, Field Museum

• 20th Century
• Focused on
• Multidisciplinary
• Researched Plans
• Object Interpretation
• Hands On
• Behind the Scenes
• Memorable
• ACCESSIBLE

• 19th Century
• Focused on
• Disciplines
• Inventories
• Object Presentation
• Descriptive Info
• Staged Scenes
• Exotic and Remote Locales
• AVAILABLE

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Mission

• Remain true to mission
• Capitalize on strengths
• Utilize technology

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Mission, Vision, and Values

• This should express the purpose of the
  organization and describe what is distinctive
  about it
• What is the organization trying to accomplish
• Marketplace niche
• Quality of products/services
• Example Washington Resource Library Consortium
• We saw this idea as a natural extension of the
  digital library system we were already providing.
  We have a plan for integrating the new service
  into the existing organization

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Assessment

• Needs and Program Measures

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Assessment Categories

• Before Beginning Product/Program
• Needs assessment or market research
• learning about user needs and market
  characteristics
• Measuring Product/Program
• Outcomes assessment
• how have you changed individual lives/behaviors,
  or organizational practice, and what difference
  your program made
• Output assessment
• data providing information on success in goals

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Who Are The Users?

• College students, faculty, researchers
• General public in the region
• International web-using public
• Physical visitors
• K-12 students and teachers
• Hobbyists
• Businesses
• Library organizations and their staff
• Museums and their staff
• Individuals with disabilities

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How to Find Out About User Needs and Preferences

• Expert opinion (librarian or curator judgment)
• Based on anecdotal evidence
• Based on curator subject knowledge
• Often based on knowledge of existing users rather
  than potential or future users
• http//www.imls.gov/pubs/pdf/userneedsassessment.p
  df

• Research based knowledge of user preferences
• Do-It-Yourself Market Research
• Web Surveys
• Phone or in-person interviews
• Focus group research
• Social Science-Based Methodologies
• Demographically targeted
• Quantitative measures
• Controlled research

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Needs Assessment or Market Research

• Determine the data elements to be covered
• Develop the procedures for collecting the data
  and monitoring the process
• Careful development of focus group and survey
  questions
• Collect and analyze the data
• Prepare reports and present the results
• Include conclusions

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Environment and Competition

• Basic info on environment and competition
• Who are major competitors?
• How many customers does each competitors have?
• What are their strengths/weaknesses
• Demographic trends
• Key

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Evaluation
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Outcomes Assessment

• Benefits or changes for individuals or
  populations during or after participating in
  program activities, including new knowledge,
  increased skills, changed attitudes or values,
  modified behavior, improved condition, or altered
  status.
• Documenting the Difference Demonstrating the
  Value of Libraries Through Outcome Measurement,
  by Peggy D. Rudd, in Perspectives on
  Outcomes-Based Evaluation for Libraries and
  Museums, Washington, DC IMLS.

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Congruence of Objectives and Assessment

• Each objective must have measures of success
• Objective Improve teacher awareness of digital
  resources for classroom use
• Measure Though pre- and post- testing, measure
  workshop participant learning
• http//www.cdpheritage.org/about/grants/2001/imls_
  prop_edu_2001.pdf (further examples, pages 2-7)

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Project Outcomes Assessment Techniques

• How did you change behavior, organizations,
  lives? What difference did you make?
• Surveys
• Written surveys
• Telephone surveys
• Email surveys (home-done or corporate)
• Case study or interview
• Focus groups (formal, structured discussions)

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Output Measures Data Collection

• Some indicators of success are measures you can
  collect without surveys or focus groups
• How many uses were there?
• Who used it?
• How many resources are available?
• Were activities completed as promised?

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Example

• Decide that your targeted user group is teachers
• Do surveys or focus groups to ask what they need
  or would use in the classroom
• Create digital resources to meet those needs
• Follow up with additional focus groups to find
  out how teachers actually used the digital
  resources
• Modify program depending on results

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Summary

• Base your predicted outcomes on research about
  user needs and preferences
• Build in activities that let you know if you
  succeeded in achieving the outcomes you planned
• Be ready to change course depending on measured
  results

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Financial Plans/Costing Analysis

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Financial Goals

• You need to work with senior management to
  determine financial goals
• What is your margin target? (i.e. profit)
• 10, 20, 50 ?
• Do you need to
• Cover fixed costs?
• Cover fixed and variable costs?
• Just need to break even for now as beginning
• Or do you need to earn a 20 margin immediately?

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Financial Plans

• Should outline finances for 3-5 years
• Include revenue and expense components
• Salaries and fringe
• Training
• Legal and accounting
• Equipment
• Promotion costs
• Sales costs
• Exhibit costs

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Financial Considerations

• Work with Legal and Accounting offices to
  determine your institutions specific policies
  on
• Amortization
• Overhead
• Benefits
• Indirect cost rates

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Wrap-Up

• Business planning is essential for long term
  sustainability
• Remember to create a product/service that is true
  to your institutions mission and goals
• Do your research!
• Define your competitive advantage
• Conduct Needs Assessment, Product Evaluation and
  Usability Assessments
• Be prepared to change!
• Businesses must

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Practitioner Presentations

• Bettina Meyer Assistant Dean for Resources,
  Western Michigan University Libraries
• Nancy Allen Dean and Director of Penrose
  Library at the University of Denver
• Geri Bunker Ingram Customer Service Specialist,
  DiMeMa

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Questions?

• Dont Forget Evaluations!
• Laurie Gemmill
• OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
• 800-848-5878 ext. 6160
• Laurie_Gemmill_at_oclc.org