revisiting an article on the Audit Checklist

I will be attending a Digital Futures Alliance meeting at UW this week. In preparation, I'm reviewing an article (authored by a UIUC team led by Joanne Kaczmarek) that I read last year on the 2005 RLG/NARA Audit Checklist for the Certification of a Trusted Digital Repository. The authors review existing repository assessment tools (such as the OSI guide that I extensively used in creating a software recommendation for the WSU Libraries, and then describe their efforts to create a review document based upon digital preservation, using the Audit Checklist as a foundation.

The goal of the Audit Checklist effort, as described in the article, is to "identify digital repositories capable of reliably storing, migrating, and providing access to digital collections."

Having worked closely with the archival community over the last four years, I was intrigued by the authors' discussion of the merging of librarian and archivist work: "the traditional role of the archivist, who assures authenticity of resources through chain of custody and retains pertinent contextual information, may now converge with the role traditionally assumed by the librarian, who provides broad and reliable access to information resources needed by library patrons....." One point that I remembered when I read this discussion was Tom Clareson's digital preservation presentation at SAA 2007; he noted the need to bring archivists who have worked with the preservation of analog materials into the digital preservation process.

The use of archival terms to describe digital repository processes has always been an issue. For example, the creation of the OAI-PMH specification led the leaders in the spec's creation to defend their use of the term "archival." In the same way, the authors address the use of the term "repositories," noting that its traditional use has been to describe institutions such as the Library of Congress or the British Library. Again, the lines between library work and archival work are becoming more blurred in the age of digitization.

The authors conclude that "the annotated Audit Checklist provides a good framework for looking at repository software applications within the context of digital preservation." However, the tool is lacking for other important repository assessment criteria, including programming language(s) required to maintain a repository, and harvesting support by search engines and other repositories.