Introduction

The Workshop, Digital Curation & Trusted Repositories: Seeking Success, was held on June 15, 2006 in conjunction with the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2006, June 11-15, 2006 - Chapel Hill, NC, USA).

Preservation of access to digital assets stands as one of the grand challenges of the early 21st century. A decade of work in digital preservation and access has resulted in many projects, numerous metadata and encoding standards, open institutional repository platforms, such as DSpace and Fedora, and the OAIS Reference Model. The Research Libraries Group (RLG) and OCLC have described the attributes and responsibilities of such trusted repositories, and RLG and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) have drafted an audit checklist for certifying digital repositories as trustworthy.

Guidelines, such as those provided by RLG and NARA, offer technical and managerial attributes for a trusted digital repository, but will adherence to such a checklist, by itself, ensure a successful digital repository, especially the institutional repositories emerging on university campuses today? What are the most promising approaches for implementing the attributes? What does trust really mean in the context of a contributor-based repository, and will individuals or organizations contribute to a repository just because they trust that it will preserve digital assets over time? What incentives and assistance are needed? What is the role of the archivist vis-a-vis the digital life cycle and the stewardship of digital assets over time? What, indeed, constitutes a successful digital repository and how can we ascertain and measure such success?

This workshop served as a forum for discussion as to how the emerging principles of digital curation, "the active management and appraisal of data over the life-cycle of scholarly and scientific interest" (Digital Curation Center), can work with technical and managerial models to produce not only trusted, but successful repositories that will house rich digital assets over the long-term.

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Workshop Objectives

Audience

The workshop was planned to serve an audience of professionals engaged in digital curation and digital repository activities. This included:

Digital repository developers and curators,
Digital archivists and electronic records managers,
Institutional repository developers,
Institutional administrators and policy developers,
Digital librarians,
Scholars engaged in research intended to benefit the above, and
Researchers and administrators charged with preserving research data.

Aims

The overall objective of the Workshop was to bring together a group of diverse professionals, representing a range of experience and expertise, to allow detailed exploration on the issues of digital curation, trusted digital repositories, and assessing success. The agenda of the Workshop was designed to provide a:

Presentation of digital curation principles,
Exploration of what constitutes success and excellence in digital curation and digital repository management,
Discussion on identifying and defining criteria for success, including exploration of a shared lexicon for describing digital repository attributes,
Examination of strategies for measuring and evaluating success criteria, and
Discussion of next steps, potential collaborations, and needed research in the application of digital curation to repository development.

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Submissions and Logistics

Call for Papers

A call for papers was issued at the end of March 2006. All interested parties were invited to submit a brief (3-4 pages) paper on any of the following topics:

What constitutes success in a digital repository?
How can we best measure the success of digital repositories?
How is certification of digital repositories related to success?
Beyond meeting certification guidelines, what does it mean to be a trusted repository and what role does trust play in repository success?
How can the principles and activities of digital curation help repositories to be successful?

The submitted papers were assessed for their relevance to the workshop and reviewed by the Workshop Program Committee. Ultimately, twelve papers were selected for presentation. Selected papers were distributed to attendees at the workshop and mounted as proceedings on the workshop website, as well as the JCDL 2006 wiki. An investigation is currently underway on how to proceed following the Workshop event. This may involve extensions of the short papers presented at the Workshop, resulting in formal publication. All papers were formatted in line with the ACM SIG proceedings template. Further, Authors reserve all rights to their works, allowing us to post here in support of this workshop.

Workshop Date/Time: The Workshop took place on June 15, 2006, commencing at 8:30 am and concluding at 5:00 pm. See for the schedule of presenters and discussions.

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Workshop Organizers

Members of the Workshop Program Committee are: Dr. Philip Eppard, SUNY-Albany; Dr. Christopher (Cal) Lee, UNC at Chapel Hill; Dr. Karen Markey, Univ. of Michigan; Dr. Soo Young Rieh, Univ. of Michigan; Dr. Helen Tibbo, UNC at Chapel Hill; and Dr. Elizabeth Yakel, Univ. of Michigan.

Additional planning support was provided by Carolyn Hank, TRLN Doctoral Fellow, UNC at Chapel Hill.