The repository shall ensure that the Content Information of the AIPs is understandable for their Designated Community at the time of creation of the AIP.

This is necessary in order to ensure that one of the primary tests of preservation, namely that the digital holdings are understandable by their Designated Community, can be met. (See 4.3 for additional requirements for understandability beyond ingest.)

Test procedures to be run against the digital holdings to ensure their understandability to the defined Designated Community; records of such tests being performed and evaluated; evidence of gathering or identifying Representation Information to fill any intelligibility gaps which have been found; retention of individuals with the discipline expertise.

This requirement is concerned with the understandability of the AIP. If the ingested material is not understandable, the repository needs to ingest or make available additional information to make sure that the AIPs are understandable to the Designated Community(ies). For example, if documents are written in a dying language and the Designated Community is no longer able to understand the language the documents are written in, the repository would need to provide additional documentation that would allow the Designated Community to understand the documents (e.g., translations of the documents in a language the Designated Community could understand or dictionaries that would allow the Designated Communities to translate the documents into a language its members understand).

APTrust validates BagIt bags containing files and translates the bag into an intellectual object on ingest, then verifies the integrity of intellectual objects and files every ninety days through fixity checks. See the pages on Object Resource and Item Resource for more information.

In short, each AIP consists of an Intellectual Object that contains the high level overview of the Bagit bag and it’s metadata, and maintains relationships with each of the files (called Generic Files) that the Bagit bag contained. The metadata for the files is all available as well so that AIPs are very clear and understandable.

In addition, APTrust performs routine automated spot tests to randomly reassemble AIPs into DIPs (BagIt bags) and restore them to depositors. Depositors then confirm the materials are complete and intelligible. The restoration spot test process is described in detail at 4.2.7.2 Execute testing process of Content Information of AIPs#Examples Provided.

In general, it is the depositor’s job to ensure the presence of sufficient metadata to make their content understandable. APTrust allows depositors to continually upload new metadata to be stored with their intellectual objects, as described in our TDR documentation at 4.2.7.3 Bring Content Information of AIP up to level of understandability if it fails testing, and in the “Using APTrust” section of our wiki at Using APTrust#Updating.

This page is linked on the Mandatory Responsibilities page.