Discussion of Technology Costs Academic librarians argued that cost recovery is becoming an imperative and that collaboration is touted as one way of cutting costs. Economies of scale provide one of the strongest motivations for collaboration. The librarians conceded that economies of scale have yet to be realized but asserted that the desire to avoid duplication is a strong factor in encouraging institutional cooperation. Looking at the example of off-site storage to control the costs of traditional book access, they proposed that a similar model could be used to control costs of storage and retrieval of digital data. Academic librarians also expressed concern about whether society will continue to transfer resources to digitization, especially since such efforts remain a cottage industry.
Doubts linger about compelling incentives for collaborating.
Moreover, technology has given users a sense of entitlement, even though there is no public recognition of the real costs of digital services. Large academic libraries that are used to collecting as comprehensively as they can in areas in which they declare an interest must decide whether to stop acquiring as many print items in order to digitize their existing collections and acquire new ones in electronic form only. Digitization is at risk of becoming yet another unfunded mandate. Museum administrators were similarly divided on the issue of controlling the costs of digitization. Art museum managers were also generally sanguine about the prospects for generating revenue and suggested user fees or graduated license fees for different levels of image quality as a way to recover costs.