CDMP project costs

Our early large-scale transcription projects were done in collaboration with NOAA’s Climate Data Modernisation program (CDMP). CDMP provided contractors to do the keying, but they also funded some imaging, and supported a contractor to work in the archives finding and cataloguing records containing weather observations. We do have a record of the total dollar cost of the transcription projects each year, but not a breakdown of how it was spent, so we need to estimate the transcription costs and effort.

In the table below figures in italics are estimates based on the known CDMP budget, the total imaging cost paid for from this budget (350,000 images at £0.4 each), the approximate archive contractor cost, and an assumption that the annual cost of of one transcriber is the same as the archive contractor. These figures have not been adjusted for inflation - $1 in 2005 is about $1.30 in 2018 (and £1 is about £1.45).

Year	Project	Total CDMP budget ($)	Imaging ($)	Archives contractor ($)	Transcription ($)	Transcription (person-years)
2005	RN WW2	205K	0	65K	140K	2.15
2006	RN WW2	750K	250K	65K	435K	6.7
2007	RN WW2	422K	0	65K	357K	5.5
2008	RN WW2 & EEIC	360K	0	70K	290K	4.1
2009	EEIC	360K	0	70K	290K	4.1
2010	EEIC	375K	0	70K	305K	4.4
2011	EEIC	375K	0	70K	305K	4.4

From these data, we can estimate that the transcription costs of the RN WW2 project were about $1.4 million in 2018-dollars (£1 million) and about 16 person-years over 3.5 years elapsed. Similarly the EEIC project project transcription costs were about $1.5 million in 2018-dollars (£1.1 million) and about 14 person-years over 3.5 years elapsed. These figures are very uncertain - they could easily be 50% in error, but they should be good enough to give an indication of the cost and productivity of the CDMP approach.