The repository shall have specified all appropriate aspects of acquisition, maintenance, access, and withdrawal in written agreements with depositors and other relevant parties.

This is necessary in order to ensure that the respective roles of repository, producers, and contributors in the depositing of digital content and transfer of responsibility for preservation are understood and accepted by all parties.

Properly executed submission agreements, deposit agreements, and deeds of gift; written standard operating procedures.

The deposit agreement specifies all aspects of these issues that are necessary for the repository to carry out its function. There may be a single agreement covering all deposits, or specific agreements for each deposit, or a standard agreement supplemented by special conditions for some deposits. These special conditions may add to the standard agreement or override some aspects of the standard agreement. Agreements may need to cover restrictions on access and will need to cover all property rights in the digital objects. Agreements may place responsibilities on depositors, such as ensuring that Submission Information Packages (SIPs) conform to some pre-agreed standards, and may allow repositories to refuse SIPs that do not meet these standards. Other repositories may take responsibility for fixing errors in SIPs. The division of responsibilities must always be clear. Agreements, written or otherwise, may not always be necessary. The burden of proof is on the repository to demonstrate that it does not need such agreements because, for instance, it has a legal mandate for its activities. An agreement should include, at a minimum, property rights, access rights, conditions for withdrawal, level of security, level of finding aids, SIP definitions, time, volume, and content of transfers. One example of a standard to follow for this is the CCSDS/ISO Producer-Archive Interface Methodology Abstract Standard (reference [B4]).

1. APTrust Sustaining Member Deposit Agreement (current adopted version) September 2015
2. APTrust Cooperative Agreement
3. Process for submission and ingest
4. Deletions of objects stored in APTrust: Using APTrust#Deletion
5. Requesting the restoration of content
6. How a Depositor Converts to Direct Relationship with Third-Party Storage Provider
7. See Ingest Timeline for information about how long ingest takes and when a bag becomes APTrust’s responsibility.
8. See Restoration Timeline for information about how long restorations take to complete.