The repository shall have mechanisms to appropriately verify the identity of the Producer of all materials.

This is necessary in order to avoid providing erroneous provenance to the information which is preserved.

Legally binding submission agreements/deposit agreements/deeds of gift, evidence of appropriate technological measures; logs from procedures and authentications.

The repository’s written standard operating procedures and actual practices must ensure the digital objects are obtained from the expected depositor. Examples of a Producer include persons, organizations, corporate entities, or harvesting processes. Different repositories will adopt different levels of proof needed; the Designated Community should have the opportunity to review the evidence.

The APTrust Bagit profile is used to help maintain chain of custody, and APTrust enforces a bag naming convention based on the partner institution ID, which is pre-defined in the institutional profile when the institution joins APTrust. Root directories for bags should be named using a combination of institution ID and the unique identifier of the item to be preserved.

Bag name should follow the pattern institution_identifier.bag_identifier.tar. For example, if the University of Virginia has institutional code ‘virginia.edu’ and is creating a bag for an item with the unique ID ‘uva-lib:1229365’ then the bag root directory should be named ‘virginia.edu.uva-lib_1229365’. The receiving bucket for the APTrust production system is: aptrust.receiving.<institution.domain>.

In addition, valid APTrust bags must contain a bag-info.txt file that includes a Source-Organization field with a value containing no special characters. Source-Organization should be the human readable name of the APTrust partner organization. For example, “University of Virginia.” The depositor may be more specific, indicating a college or library within the university, such as “Georgetown University Law Library.” However, when APTrust restores bags, the source organization in the bag-info.txt file will be set to the name of the partner institution.

Depositors are able to search processed items from their own institution (or all institutions if an APTrust Admin) by whole or partial name or whole or partial entity tag (etag).

See How Deposits Work for additional information.