6 Financial and Costing Considerations

The following costs of the service can be identified:

6.1 AHDS Executive

It is envisaged that the staff will comprise a Director, a technical/research officer and an administrative assistant. All of these staff are required on a full-time and permanent basis. It is vital that the Director be someone of standing in the Arts and Humanities community and it is recommended therefore that the post is at professorial level. The costs of these three posts at current prices including national insurance and superannuation but excluding overheads will be in the order of 90 - 95k annually (about 45k, 27k and 20k respectively). In addition to this approximately 50k will be required annually for equipment, publications, travel and subsistence.

6.2 Consultancies

It is anticipated that during the first two years there will be the need for an additional budget to enable contracts to be provided to specialists to assist in the development of the methodology and procedures to be used by the data service. For example studies might be conducted on the implications of Intellectual Property Rights, or on charging systems. A budget of 50k a year for two years will be required to meet these start-up costs.

6.3 Service Providers

One of the Service Providers will have responsibility for the development, compilation and maintenance of the catalogue and for the operation of the gateway, whilst the others will have responsibility for the delivery of specified services. Service Providers might be very variable in their scale of operations but for the purpose of costing the service it should be assumed that they will each require two staff and some equipment and travel costs. The costs of this including national insurance and superannuation but excluding overheads will be of the order of 80 - 100k annually per Service Provider. The AHDS Executive may bid to be a Service Provider and may be a particularly appropriate candidate to provide the catalogue and gateway, provided it has the relevant expertise.

6.4 Other Issues

Three issues need special consideration in relation to the funding of the Arts and Humanities Data Service:

whether the host institutions will be expected to make a contribution to the costs of hosting the Executive or a Service Provider and whether overheads will be provided. Although there will be benefits to a host institution in running a service it is essential that a national service is provided and that lack of adequate finance does not distort it towards local needs, nor that small institutions with specialist expertise are discouraged from bidding by the need to make a contribution. Local institutional support may be more important for the initial Service Providers than for services added once the initial service is established.
whether non-Higher Education institutions will be eligible to receive funding to be a service provider. This is a critical issue since some of the organizations with the most expertise of data on different media are not in the HE sector.
the development and implementation of a charging policy must be a high priority, and it must take into consideration the fact that some Service Providers will have greater potential for raising all or part of their costs in the long term than others.

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