A cost benchmark

The HistoryMakers is a project that is "committed to preserving, developing and providing easy access to an internationally recognized archival collection of thousands of African American video and oral histories." Looking at their materials, they provide an interesting cost benchmark. Their printed background material from 2004 says:

Each HistoryMaker interview is approximately two hours in length and costs $2,500 to $5,000 to produce. This includes the cost of background research, videotaping, editing, transcribing, encoding, digitizing, archiving, and disseminating the information.

Thus this important work is not inexpensive. In fact, the project has been doing intensive fund raising from various sources in hopes of securing the $30 million it needs for the initial five-year archival efforts.

I blogged about this project in October after meeting Julieanna Richardson, who started this project. This is really a project worth watching because of what they are doing and how they are doing it.