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This article investigates the construction of risk within trustworthy digital repository audits. It contends that risk is a social construct, and social factors influence how stakeholders in digital preservation processes comprehend and react to risk.

This research employs a qualitative research design involving in-depth semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in the Trustworthy Digital Repository Audit and Certification (TRAC) process, and document analysis of the TRAC checklist and audit reports. I apply an analytic framework based on the Model for the Social Construction of Risk in Digital Preservation to this data.

The findings validate the argument that risk in digital preservation is indeed socially constructed and demonstrate that the eight factors in the Model for the Social Construction of Risk in Digital Preservation do indeed influence how stakeholders constructed their understanding of risk. Of the eight factors in the model, communication, expertise, uncertainty and vulnerability were found to be the most influential in the construction of risk during the TRAC audit process. The influence of complexity, organizations political culture, were more limited.

This article brings new insights to digital preservation by demonstrating the importance of understanding risk as a social construct. I argue that risk identification and/or assessment is only the first step in the long-term preservation of digital information and show that perceptions of risk in digital preservation are shaped by social factors by applying theories of social construction and risk perception to an analysis of the TRAC process.

The aim of this paper is to undertake professional profiling of the trustworthy digital repositories managers. Starting from the ISO standard: trustworthy digital repositories, 2011, an interdisciplinary high education program was designed and adapted to the requirements and skills of the electronic information managers.

The interdisciplinary study program “Advanced systems for libraries, archives and museums”, which is proposed will be disseminated to the 2011 graduates. An online questionnaire is generated and distributed to the engineering students and information science students. The research was developed at Transilvania University.

The digital repository manager is a very important job for the future of the society. The engineering students proposed very precise topics in the field of IT, skills meant to predict the size of these databases and to assure fast information recovery systems, the ones from information science proposed topics for information management, copyright conditions and information security. This is the premise of creating an attractive curriculum.

The sample size limits the extent of statistical analyses and possible generalizations. The planned qualitative research may help in confirmation of the repository manager profiles.

The proposed model may be generalized. The profile of the digital repositories manager is of great interest throughout the world. This paper describes a unique approach and could be transferred to other countries and communities.

This article explores the tension between the concept of a Designated Community (DC) as a foundational element in Trustworthy Digital Repository (TDR) certification and curators' uncertainty about how to interpret and apply this concept in practice.

This research employs a qualitative research design involving in-depth semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in the Trustworthy Digital Repository Audit and Certification (TRAC) process.

The authors' findings indicate that stakeholders in the audit and certification process viewed their uncertainty about how to apply the concept of a DC in the context of an audit as a source of risk for digital repositories and the repositories' collections.

This article brings new insights to digital preservation by applying social theories of risk to trustworthy digital repository audit and certification processes, with an emphasis on the concept of DC.

Digital repositories offer a great benefit to people in a variety of settings, especially since an ever‐increasing amount of information is being gathered, transmitted, and preserved through various technologies. The purpose of this paper is to underscore trust as a critical element in the infrastructure of digital repositories and to look more closely at trusted digital repositories from the perspective of the user communities for which they are designed.

The paper looks to the literature in reviewing the concept of trust and its role in an online environment. Attention is then paid to trusted digital repositories, with close examination of the user communities’ perceptions of trust and the impact of these perceptions. Special attention is given to users within the academic community.

While digital repositories may be trustworthy because of adherence to technological standards, accepted practices, and mechanisms for authenticating the authorship and accuracy of their content, it is ultimately their respective stakeholders – both those who deposit and use content – whose perceptions play a central role in ensuring a digital repository's trustworthiness.

A future empirical study would be beneficial in order to measure perceptions of trust as contributing factors to the trustworthiness of digital repositories.

This paper provides a useful resource for persons wishing to review the topic of trusted digital repositories or increase their awareness in this area.

This paper offers a focused look at various levels of trust as they relate to the dissemination of scholarly communication in the academic world, particularly through institutional repositories.

The purpose of this case study is to discuss the creation of robust preservation functionality within PURR. The study seeks to discuss the customization of the HUBzero platform, composition of digital preservation policies, and the creation of a novel, machine-actionable metadata model for PURR's unique digital content. Additionally, the study will trace the implementation of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model and track PURR's progress towards Trustworthy Digital Repository certification.

This case study discusses the use of the Center for Research Libraries Trusted Repository Audit Checklist (TRAC) certification process and ISO 16363 as a rubric to build an OAIS institutional repository for the publication, preservation, and description of unique datasets.

ISO 16363 continues to serve as a rubric, barometer and set of goals for PURR as development continues. To become a trustworthy repository, the PURR project team has consistently worked to build a robust, secure, and long-term home for collaborative research. In order to fulfill its mandate, the project team constructed policies, strategies, and activities designed to guide a systematic digital preservation environment. PURR expects to undertake the full ISO 16363 audit process at a future date in expectation of being certified as a Trustworthy Digital Repository. Through its efforts in digital preservation, the Purdue University Research Repository expects to better serve Purdue researchers, their collaborators, and move scholarly research efforts forward world-wide.

PURR is a customized instance of HUBzero®, an open source software platform that supports scientific discovery, learning, and collaboration. HUBzero was a research project funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) and is a product of the Network for Computation Nanotechnology (NCN), a multi-university initiative of eight member institutions. PURR is only one instance of a HUBzero's customization; versions have been implemented in many disciplines nation-wide. PURR maintains the core functionality of HUBzero, but has been modified to publish datasets and to support their preservation. Long-term access to published data are an essential component of PURR services and Purdue University Libraries' mission. Preservation in PURR is not only vital to the Purdue University research community, but to the larger digital preservation issues surrounding dynamic datasets and their long-term usability.

Preservation environments such as repositories need scalable and context-aware preservation planning and monitoring capabilities to ensure continued accessibility of content over time. This article identifies a number of gaps in the systems and mechanisms currently available and presents a new, innovative architecture for scalable decision-making and control in such environments.

The paper illustrates the state of the art in preservation planning and monitoring, highlights the key challenges faced by repositories to provide scalable decision-making and monitoring facilities, and presents the contributions of the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite to provide such capabilities.

The presented architecture makes preservation planning and monitoring context-aware through a semantic representation of key organizational factors, and integrates this with a business intelligence system that collects and reasons upon preservation-relevant information.

The architecture has been implemented in the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite. Integration with repositories and external information sources provide powerful preservation capabilities that can be freely integrated with virtually any repository.

The open nature of the software suite enables stewardship organizations to integrate the components with their own preservation environments and to contribute to the ongoing improvement of the systems.

The paper reports on innovative research and development to provide preservation capabilities. The results enable proactive, continuous preservation management through a context-aware planning and monitoring cycle integrated with operational systems.

The terms “digital curation” and “cyberinfrastructure” have been coined in the last decade to describe distinct but related concepts of how data can be managed, preserved, manipulated and made available for long‐term use. This paper aims to examine these.

The paper considers the origins of both terms and the communities that have been engaged with each of them, traces the development of the present digital environment in the USA and considers what this may mean for the future.

The paper reveals that each term has important attributes that contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the digital knowledge universe.

The paper reveals information about the development of digital preservation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the value of Blockchain technology as a solution to creating and preserving trustworthy digital records, presenting some of the limitations, risks and opportunities of the approach.

The methodological approach involves using the requirements embedded in records management and digital preservation standards, specifically ISO 15,489, ARMA’s Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles, ISO 14,721 and ISO 16,363, as a general evaluative framework for a risk-based assessment of a specific proposed implementation of Blockchain technology for a land registry system in a developing country.

The results of the analysis suggest that Blockchain technology can be used to address issues associated with information integrity in the present and near term, assuming proper security architecture and infrastructure management controls. It does not, however, guarantee reliability of information in the first place, and would have several limitations as a long-term solution for maintaining trustworthy digital records.

This paper contributes an original analysis of the application of Blockchain technology for recordkeeping.

This paper aims to carry out a literature review on the implementation of digital preservation policies, strategies and actions by institutional repositories. The objective is to identify, out of the published experiences, at which level they are fulfilling the function of ensuring the long-term availability of the deposited materials.

Using a systematic literature review methodology, a total of 21 articles from international refereed journals published between 2009 and 2020 are reviewed.

The research production on this subject is very limited. The scarce number of published articles proves that the interest of repository managers has been focused on issues other than to assure the long-term availability of the assets they store. The literature review has not found clear evidence about how institutional repositories are implementing digital preservation. It is particularly striking the lack of works focused on the situation in European countries. More field studies are needed. They would allow to extract conclusions and produce best practices to help managers to improve preservation strategies.

This study has shown that one of the main functions of repositories is not being dealt with as promised by repository managers. More work in this area is needed. In particular, it is necessary for a study at the European level to gather detailed data that will allow to draw a portrait of the current situation, extract conclusions and produce best practices to help managers to improve or develop preservation strategies.

Taking the researchers’ perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine the types of context information needed to preserve data’s meaning in ways that support data reuse.

This paper is based on a qualitative study of 105 researchers from three disciplinary communities: quantitative social science, archaeology and zoology. The study focused on researchers’ most recent data reuse experience, particularly what they needed when deciding whether to reuse data.

Findings show that researchers mentioned 12 types of context information across three broad categories: data production information (data collection, specimen and artifact, data producer, data analysis, missing data, and research objectives); repository information (provenance, reputation and history, curation and digitization); and data reuse information (prior reuse, advice on reuse and terms of use).

This paper extends digital curation conversations to include the preservation of context as well as content to facilitate data reuse. When compared to prior research, findings show that there is some generalizability with respect to the types of context needed across different disciplines and data sharing and reuse environments. It also introduces several new context types. Relying on the perspective of researchers offers a more nuanced view that shows the importance of the different context types for each discipline and the ways disciplinary members thought about them. Both data producers and curators can benefit from knowing what to capture and manage during data collection and deposit into a repository.