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Appendix D: Soft Costs for Digital Preservation
Pages 148-150

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From page 148...
... are usually characterized by soft costs, since the IT department does not have the burden to measure or reduce these costs." Putting a dollar amount to soft costs so that they can be compared directly to hard costs does not seem feasible in most cases, but it is often possible to compare the relative soft costs of alternative approaches. For example, considering Merrill's soft cost of discovery time, there might be two approaches to supporting a repository of genetic sequences.
From page 149...
... It is difficult to assign a dollar value to delayed or forgone discoveries, especially as the nature of those potential discoveries is challenging to foresee. In the biomedical research setting, this cost might have to be ­ pproached as setting a tolerable likelihood of loss and evaluating alternative a approaches by whether they fall within that likelihood.
From page 150...
... With such information, one could easily determine whether Approach C "dominates" Approach D, in terms of C having equal or lower soft costs than D across all facets, or isolate the trade-off points between C and D: on what specific facets does C have higher or lower soft costs than D? It is tempting to ignore soft costs in forecasting, since they may not be quantitative or they accrue outside the immediate organizational unit.


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