Bradley Hall A/B

Wednesday July 11, 2012

Part I: 1:30-3:00 PM; Part II 3:30-5:00 PM

Presenters: Namdo Cho, Elizabeth Yakel, Devan Ray Donaldson, Chien-Yi Hou

Namdo Cho

Creating Sustainable Trustworthiness: Trusted Digital Repositories Maturity Model (TDR-MM)

Background
In 2002, the concept of ‘Trusted Digital Repositories (TDR)’ and its required attributes were introduced. TDR is “one whose mission is to provide reliable, long-term access to managed digital resources to its designated community, now and in the future” [1]. Since that time, many attempts have been made to implement the attributes of TDR. One approach is identifying mandatory requirements to establish trustworthy DRs such as developing international standard [2], archival system architecture [3, 4, 5], metadata requirements [3, 4, 5, 6], functional requirements [7, 8, 9, 10], and managerial practices [11, 12, 13, 14]. Another approach is evaluating if DRs properly keep these requirements. Some studies have developed methods to evaluate trustworthiness of DRs, including audit criteria [15, 16] and risk assessment tool [17].  While these efforts clarified mandatory requirements and evaluation criteria to gain trustworthiness in DRs, they provide only a static view of current external status of a DR in ensuring trustworthiness. In other words, they do not offer a comprehensive view on internalized organizational capability of a DR and how the capability should be improved
over time to maintain its trustworthiness. A DR’s organizational capability to ensure trustworthiness should include proper policies and their application on daily operation; well-defined and actualized processes in registering, classifying, retaining, preserving, and providing access to digital information; technology to support the processes with proper control and maintenance; and human resources that understand their roles and responsibilities. Although a DR satisfies the requirements or audit criteria at the time of evaluation, all of these organization capability components cannot be fulfilled at one time evaluation. Since organizational capability is matured over time by continuous improvement, this continuous improvement is possible through multiple, small evolutionary steps rather than one time radical innovation [18]. Evaluation of trustworthiness in digital repositories should be approached not only with one time criteria checking but also by comprehensive assessment of a DR’s organizational capability in a holistic framework.

Objectives
The purpose of this research is to develop a ‘Trusted Digital Repositories Maturity Model (TDR-MM)’, which is a five staged model that can assess current stage of a DR’s organizational capability in ensuring trustworthiness. The model will also provide the DR with guidance to enhance its capability to the next stage, ultimately to maintain long-term sustainable trustworthiness.  TDR-MM model has adopted Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) which is one of the advanced models in evaluating organizational capability [18]. The CMMI defines five levels that organizations go through as they move from an immature stage to a mature one of organizational capability. Each level has criteria that show that an organization has a level of capability to achieve its business goals. Through this method, an organization can assess its current level of capability and plan for the next level according to the next level’s criteria.

Contribution to advancement of knowledge
First, TDR-MM is the first attempt to provide a staged maturity model for a digital repository as an organization. It provides a new way to assess the organizational capability level of DRs in the perspective of long-term sustainable trustworthiness. This model offers an assessment of current level as well as guidance to the next level of DR’s capability rather than one-time requirements check or audit. As such, it advances conceptual knowledge in the fields of digital repository and digital preservation.  Second, this model offers information about the strength and weakness of a DR’s operation through the comprehensive assessment. Therefore, the model can be used as a common ground of communication among different types of professionals in a DR, as a tool for planning improvement of organizational capability, as a foundation of future decision making and strategy development. Further, this model can be applied to other types of organizations that create, store, distribute, preserve, and provide access to digital information.

Elizabeth Yakel

The Invisible Handshake: Digital Data Repositories as the Link between Producers and Consumers of Data

Disciplinary norms and practices guide data collection, analysis, and the ultimate determination of evidence.  Yet, often these norms and practices are only implicitly conveyed in the data and any ancillary documentation with the data. This makes the work of digital data repositories difficult because it means they must ingest, encode, and relate digital data to more ephemeral disciplinary-specific contextual data.  This presentation will be based on data from the “Dissemination Information Packages for Data Reuse” project which is examining digital preservation and data reuse in three disciplinary communities: quantitative social scientists, archaeologists, and zoologists.  I will present findings from an analysis of 50 interviews with quantitative social scientists and archaeologists.  The findings will focus on digital data repositories as intermediaries (and as a source of intermediation or perhaps disintermediation) between data producers and data consumers and the role of disciplinary practices, methodology and analysis techniques, and how the presence of a culture of data sharing affects digital data repositories.

Devan Ray Donaldson
My research presentation entitled, “Trust in the Wild: End-User Perceptions of Trustworthiness Beyond the Preservation Repository” will present preliminary findings from my multi-phase study which aims to understand: 1) end-users’ perspectives on trust and trustworthiness, 2) how to communicate with end-users regarding the trustworthiness of digital objects preserved by a preservation repository, and 3) which trust mechanisms, if any, are effective in communicating trustworthiness, when the digital objects are found outside of their preservation context.  Implications of this work may provide justification for trust-branding at the document level, exposure of preservation metadata, and recommendations for additional information to be provided with Dissemination Information Packages (DIPs).

Chien Yi Hou

Challenges of building a trusted archival preservation service

To build an archival preservation environment that is trusted and could be accommodated to multiple different archival institutions is quite challenging. A trusted archival preservation service will need to provide essential services to manage the preservation environment and give customers the options to define their own institutional preservation policies. In this presentation, I will present how we use a rule based data grid system to build a distributed preservation environment and how to make it easier for the customers to define their own policies to mange the collections. I will also discuss the lessons learned from the whole process.