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The Cost of Digitization

Libraries have to take many things into consideration when considering starting a new digitization project.

Equipment for mass digitization is usually specialized and very expensive. Only a few companies make the equipment, allowing them a strong control over the overall market. This causes prices to be inflated. For book scanners a library could pay anywhere from $40,000 to $300,000 for just one piece of equipment. Some book scanners cut the book out of the binding before scanning the pages individually. Keeping an expensive piece of equipment working past the purchase date usually means the library also has to pay a yearly maintenance or warrantee subscription, which adds to the overall price of the equipment. A good guess is 10-15% of the purchase price every year to keep the equipment running. For a $300,000 machine that comes to $30,000-$45,000 a year for as long as the machine is being used.

In addition to the price of the equipment, the library must pay for server storage space to make the items available on-line, and pay for someone to maintain the servers. Servers can cost many thousands of dollars depending on the size of the server. The library may have to pay for a content management system to keep track of the items and pay for someone to maintain the program. Some content management systems are free, but require extensive programming to make them useful, requiring the library to either hire programmers or outsource the work. If the library can't hire programmers, then they must buy a pre-made content management system that costs thousands of dollars with a yearly maintenance fee.

Archiving digital files can also be expensive. Some estimates say that it costs $10 per image to preserve and image for 10 years. For just one book with 300 pages, that's $3000. For 14,000 books (the size of our thesis and dissertation collection) that's $45,000,000, over ten years.
In short, digitization is expensive but libraries are starting to see that the expense is worth the functionality and versatility of the digital format.

Smaller libraries can often not afford large scale digitization efforts, and often only digitize a few items and host them on a normal HTML webpage.
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