Designing Storage Architectures for Preservation Collections

Tech@ICPSR will be heading to DC in late September to attend another annual installment of Designing Storage Architectures for Preservation Collections hosted by the Library of Congress (link to last year's meeting page).  This promises to be another useful meeting, and as I've done in the past, I'll post some my notes from the meeting.

The past couple of meetings have given considerable attention to the cost of the hardware and software systems that supply the basic storage platform.  There's usually a lot of interesting tidbits in those conversations, but my sense is that the people costs of ingest and curation are the major costs at ICPSR.  I can't tell if that's unusual amongst this crowd (e.g., they have way more content than we do, and it requires far less human touch), or if it is the proverbial elephant in the room that no one mentions.