The December 2006 D-Lib Magazine was released last Friday. One article that caught my attention concerns trusted digital repositories and assessing repository software packages for digital preservation support. Several years ago, I worked with the lead author, Joanne Kaczmarek, in harvesting WSU digital collections content into the Cultural Heritage Repository. She and her UIUC colleagues are working on an NDIIPP-related project, the ECHO DEPository. I found this background paper on the project to be informative; it emphasizes the archival community involvement in ECHO DEPository (Richard Pearce-Moses, who I heard speak in Washington this summer at SAA, is a co-author).
In my view, the preservation function in repositories is given insufficent attention. The effectiveness of the dissemination function (emphasized in the naming of the local repository service, WSU Research Exchange) can be easily tracked, using indicators such as the number of items indexed by a search engine, as one counting method. A tool like DSpace fully enables dissemination thru OAICat; in contrast, DSpace provides only a foundation for digital preservation through tools such as its bitstream format registry and tracking bitstream checksums.
The article describes a checklist developed at UIUC that's derived from the RLG/NARA Audit Checklist for certifiying digital repositories. The UIUC team took those items from the Audit Checklist that are applicable to repository software packages and annotated them to define the checklist items in greater specificity.
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