Running some numbers
Ok, inspired by your good work I've been running some numbers on volume. (I'm supposed to be working on "phased implementation" but I wanted to get a handle on what kind of quantity we're dealing with first.)It isn't very easy to get average costs for recon. I ended up averaging figures provided by the SUS institutions in their annual Florida Heritage funding requests, although I have no clue how accurate the estimates in the requests were. This is what I got:
average cost to scan a page = $0.50
average cost to OCR and mark-up a page = $0.10
average cost of metadata per title = $100.00 (this includes 2 costs, making a METS file and updating an existing catalog record; it does not include full original cataloging)
Note these figures do not include copyright clearance which would be prohibitive, so we need to assume public domain materials.
Using 300 as the average number of pages per title (I thought it was 350, but I got 300 from the University of California) this yields a cost-per-title of $280 per title. (REALITY CHECK: CMU reported it cost $25 - $150 to recon a book in the U.S. The National Yiddish Book Center reported $292 per book. Internet Archive OCA mass digitization projects estimate $30 title -- ten cents per page -- but may not include the same costs.)
If we got 1% of library materials budgets it would come to roughly $400,000 / year, which would recon 1428 titles / year.