Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
25.2 TRAC and Related Documents
Section 1.5 of OAIS (the section entitled
Road map for development of related stan-
dards
) included an item for accreditation of archives, reflecting the long-standing
demand for a standard against which Repositories of digital information may
be audited and on which an international accreditation and certification process
may be based. It was agreed that RLG and NARA take a lead on this follow-on
standard.
A group was gathered by NARA and RLG (the latter subsequently incorpo-
rated into OCLC) to form the Task Force on Trusted Digital Repositories. This
group produced the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification: Criteria
and Checklist [
244
]. The work combined concepts from OAIS and the Trusted
Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities [
245
]. The latter allowed the
group to supplement OAIS with considerations of financial stability and training of
personnel.
The document has a number of metrics grouped into
•
Organisational Infrastructure
•
Digital Object Management and Technologies
•
Technical Infrastructure
•
Security.
Accompanying each of the metrics is extensive additional explanatory text and
examples of the types of evidence which might be used as proof of fulfilling the
metrics. The document has being used as the basis for internal and test audits in
a number of repositories, however it is not part of a formal audit and certification
process.
Other work in this area includes:
•
the German preservation consortium, nestor, has produced a Catalogue of Criteria
for Trusted Digital Repositories [
246
]
•
in early 2007 representatives from the Digital Curation Center [
3
],
DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE,
http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/
),
NESTOR (Germany) and the Center for Research Libraries (North America)
met and produced a list of 10 core criteria for digital preservation repositories, to
guide further international efforts on auditing and certifying repositories [
247
].
A comparison of this list with the OAIS responsibilities was produced [
248
].
•
Ross et al. [
249
] produced comments on the TRAC document
•
a cross-walk between the TRAC, nestor and Ross documents was produced
[
250
]
•
the DCC and DPE projects produced the Digital Repository Audit Method Based
on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) toolkit. This toolkit is intended to facilitate
internal audit by providing repository administrators with a means to assess their
capabilities, identify their weaknesses, and recognise their strengths.
