CERTIFICATION

• The groundwork has been laid for the establishment of the long-awaited certification process for digital repositories. Over the last three years, the RLG-NARA task force has worked to define and articulate criteria or indicators of trustworthiness and reliability for digital repositories.  The Center for Research Libraries now offers a service to its members who want to use the certification process.  The Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC): Criteria and Checklist provides the opportunity for repositories to establish themselves as trustworthy and to be certified by an independent third party.

METADATA

• PREMIS Data Dictionary.  The objectives of PREMIS were 1) to develop a core preservation metadata set, supported by a data dictionary, with broad applicability across the digital preservation community and 2) to identify and evaluate alternative strategies for encoding, storing, and managing preservation metadata in digital preservation systems.  The PREMIS data dictionary and XML schema are maintained by the PREMIS maintenance activity, hosted by the Library of Congress. The dictionary may be accessed at http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/