Caring Types: How Levels Of Retention, Curation And Preservation Drive Transparent Repository Metadata

Clearer, common descriptors of repository types and the levels of care they provide are needed to enable the design, planning and implementation of research infrastructures. Explicit and transparent metadata support the range of necessary retention, curation and preservation activities and functions across communities. As plans to deliver more interoperable and federated scientific infrastructures (including EOSC) have evolved and digital object-focussed criteria (such as FAIR) have emerged, a growing range of actors are involved in repository-related fields. Researchers, funders and other stakeholders need ways to better understand repositories’ services, reliability and sustainability. Clear, common descriptors of repository types and the levels of care they provide, supported by explicit and transparent metadata, can provide orientation around the range of retention, curation, and preservation activities and functions provided by research infrastructures. The notion of repository criteria, assessment and certification evolved from reference modelling through to the development of standards and processes related to trustworthy digital repositories. The common assumption amongst these approaches was for organisations hosting or sharing digital objects to take responsibility for preservation over time. Both inside and outside the libraries and archives specialist communities the definitions and assumptions around preservation have broadened as a wider number of institutions self-label as repositories and as trustworthy. This beneficial growth and spread has also lead to some blurred concepts and gaps in communication. More recent applications for the CoreTrustSeal are from a broader range of services, including those not in scope for certification due to the absence of active long term preservation services. For internal and wider community benefit they developed a community driven position paper on the levels of care provided across different repositories. This led to a follow up discussion paper on using the levels to define repositories, including beyond those providing active preservation. The authors (including repository staff and CoreTrustSeal Board members) worked through the implications of these levels and types to consider what structured metadata their adoption would imply. Taken together, this approach places transparent retention information at the foundation of increasing tiers of care and responsibility from the deposit compliance criteria during appraisal and selection, through to initial curation measures to meet standards and quality expectations. These are all aligned with a more explicit statement about what it means to provide active long term preservation This talk will examine the drivers for a new perspective and the potential for a future that more clearly defines the responsibilities undertaken by those caring for digital objects in interoperable and federated infrastructures.