Implementing Trusted Digital Repositories

Scientific Data

as information and communication technology has become pervasive in our society, we are increasingly dependent on both digital data and repositories that provide access to and enable the use of such resources. Repositories must earn the trust of the communities they intend to serve and demonstrate that they are reliable and capable of appropriately managing the data they hold. F ollowing a year-long public discussion and building on existing community consensus 1 , several stakeholders, representing various segments of the digital repository community, have collaboratively developed and endorsed a set of guiding principles to demonstrate digital repository trustworthiness. Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability and Technology: the TRUST Principles provide a common framework to facilitate discussion and implementation of best practice in digital preservation by all stakeholders.

2019

Over any time frame that spans multiple generations of information technology, there is uncertainty whether digital objects or outputs from digital objects can be verified as the same things they were originally. The Preservation as a Service for Trust (PaaST)Project of the InterPARES Trust collaboration addressed this challenge with the objective of enabling determination of wether preserved digital information objects remain authentic. This paper, first presented at the InterPARES International Symposium in San Jose, Costa Rica on 19 February 2020, sets out the conceptualization of authenticity that guided the articulation of functional and data 1 requirements to support verifiable preservation and, thus provide a foundation of trust. It then summarizes the services that comprise the requirements and discusses the variety of ways the services can be implemented.

2014

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is building an interactive national trusted digital repository for contemporary and historical, social and cultural data held by Irish institutions. It will provide a central Internet access point and interactive multimedia tools, for use by the public, students and scholars and inform national policy for digital preservation and access. In 2011/2012 DRI conducted a requirements analysis of stakeholder needs [1].. This paper focuses on how aspects of this requirements analysis are translated into technical and policy solutions. We address how the project consortium, comprising six academic institutions, integrates with existing partner repositories and how the Digital Repository of Ireland tackles issues of repository federation in terms of storage, deposit and the legal frameworks associated with these activities.

2013

InterPARES began in 1998 with the purpose of developing the body of theory and methods necessary to ensure that digital records produced in databases and office systems, as well as in dynamic, experiential, and interactive systems in the course of artistic, scientific, and e-government activities can be created in an accurate and reliable form, and maintained and preserved in an authentic form, both in the long and short term, for the use of those who created them and for society at large, regardless of technological obsolescence and media fragility. In other words, InterPARES research was meant to develop new theory and new methodology for digital preservation, based on the understanding that preservation begins at creation.

IJDC, 2007

The MIT Libraries, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the University of California San Diego Libraries are conducting the PLEDGE Project to determine the set of policies that affect operational digital preservation archives and to develop standardized means of recording and enforcing them using rules engines. This has the potential to allow for automated assessment of "trustworthiness" of digital preservation archives. We are also evaluating the completeness of other efforts to define policies for digital preservation such as the RLG/NARA Trusted Digital Repository checklist and the PREMIS metadata schema. We present our results to date.

2000

The RLG/NARA trusted digital repository (TDR) certification checklist defines a set of management policies that establish the characteristics of a repository for digital preservation. We explore how these management policies can be mapped onto a set of repository management policies derived from the DSpace/SRB software system. We examine a mapping of the system management policies to rules, the definition of

2020

Aligning the CoreTrustSeal Requirements with an assessment of repositories' ability to enable FAIR data is an important part of delivering an EOSC. Trustworthy Digital Repositories which enable FAIR data are a dependency for many components of modern, open, distributed research. This paper sets the work within the wider context of data infrastructures, describes the co-dependencies between (meta) data objects and their repository environment, and presents the developing mapping between requirements and principles. The evolving capability/maturity approach is explained and the design of a governed assessment and certification process is defined. This work will iterate alongside the wide range of ongoing data infrastructure initiatives to support a range of stakeholders on their journey towards trustworthy repository services that enable FAIR data. Extensive engagement and feedback are planned to allow us to reach this goal.

Synthesis lectures on information concepts, retrieval, and services, 2016

A trustworthy repository provides assurance in the form of management documents, event logs, and audit trails that digital objects are being managed correctly. The assurance includes plans for the sustainability of the repository, the accession of digital records, the management of technology evolution, and the mitigation of the risk of data loss. A detailed assessment is provided by the ISO-16363:2012 standard, "Space data and information transfer systems-Audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories." This book examines whether the ISO specification for trustworthiness can be enforced by computer actionable policies. An implementation of the policies is provided and the policies are sorted into categories for procedures to manage externally generated documents, specify repository parameters, specify preservation metadata attributes, specify audit mechanisms for all preservation actions, specify control of preservation operations, and control preservation properties as technology evolves. An application of the resulting procedures is made to enforce trustworthiness within National Science Foundation data management plans.

This article discusses the relationship between authenticity and digital repositories. It highlights trust requirements in digital repositories and compares authenticity and authentication as different factors in a chain of custody. The aim is also to examine the role of the chain of custody in trusted and permanent digital preservation and the roles of a recordkeeping system in a custody of digital records on recordkeeping system and preservation platforms. It also seeks to define the importance of training and development of the information professional and the archivist for dealing with trusted digital repositories.

Report for the CASPAR project which examines concepts of, and approaches to trust. Reports the findings of a questionnaire on trust in relation to digital repositories, and considers the importance of standards.