APTrust’s primary Designated Community is its Sustaining Members, together with their respective Associate Members, which consists of research libraries and cultural heritage institutions committed to the long-term preservation of digital scholarly and cultural content.

The Knowledge Base of the Designated Community is expected to include:

• Professional expertise in digital stewardship, librarianship, or archives management;
• Familiarity with digital preservation concepts, including integrity checking, fixity, metadata standards (e.g., PREMIS, Dublin Core), and packaging standards such as BagIt;
• Access to institutional infrastructure and tools to manage digital content and metadata; and
• The ability to interpret preservation reports, audit trails, and Dissemination Information Packages (DIPs).

The Governing Board and Advisory Committee, composed of representatives from Sustaining Member institutions, provide governance and oversight of APTrust on behalf of the Designated Community.

While APTrust may also provide incidental benefits to the general public and external researchers through its members’ dissemination activities, APTrust’s preservation responsibilities are explicitly defined with respect to its Sustaining Members.

APTrust recognizes that the needs and Knowledge Base of its Designated Community may evolve, and therefore APTrust will periodically reassess and, if necessary, revise this definition to ensure that digital content remains Independently Understandable to its community.