CERTIFICATION

• The groundwork has been laid for the establishment of the long-awaited certification process for digital repositories. Over the last three years, the RLG-NARA task force has worked to define and articulate criteria or indicators of trustworthiness and reliability for digital repositories.  The Center for Research Libraries now offers a service to its members who want to use the certification process.  The Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC): Criteria and Checklist provides the opportunity for repositories to establish themselves as trustworthy and to be certified by an independent third party.

METADATA

• PREMIS Data Dictionary.  The objectives of PREMIS were 1) to develop a core preservation metadata set, supported by a data dictionary, with broad applicability across the digital preservation community and 2) to identify and evaluate alternative strategies for encoding, storing, and managing preservation metadata in digital preservation systems.  The PREMIS data dictionary and XML schema are maintained by the PREMIS maintenance activity, hosted by the Library of Congress. The dictionary may be accessed at http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/

DIGITAL PRESERVATION SURVEY

• The Fedora Preservation and Archiving Solutions Community survey was created to gather information about and examples of digital preservation developments, practices, and needs, regarding the management of digital content in repositories, specifically using open source software like Fedora. The results of the survey were shared at the 4th International Conference on Open Repositories (May 18 – 21, 2009) in Atlanta, GA.  The results are available at this link .
• The survey is still available online.