4.2.7 Content Information is understandable for Designated Community at the time of AIP creation
The repository shall ensure that the Content Information of the AIPs is understandable for their Designated Community, as exemplified by the associated Preservation Objectives, at the time of creation of the AIP.
In particular the following aspects must be checked:
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 documented in a dying language and the Designated Community is no longer able to understand the language the documents are documented 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 ensures that the Content Information of each AIP is understandable to its Designated Community at the time of creation through a combination of clearly defined service scope, documented ingest requirements, automated technical characterization, preservation metadata capture, and structured restoration testing.
APTrust’s Designated Community comprises research libraries and cultural heritage institutions that have professional expertise in digital stewardship, familiarity with preservation standards (including PREMIS, fixity concepts, and BagIt), and the institutional capacity to manage representation information locally. Within this framework:
- Depositors are responsible for providing sufficient metadata and representation information to ensure that their content is independently understandable.
- APTrust is responsible for preserving deposited files, original tag files, and preservation metadata in a manner that maintains integrity, authenticity, and retrievability.
At ingest, APTrust:
- Validates the submitted BagIt package.
- Verifies manifest checksums against transferred files.
- Decomposes the bag and stores payload files and original tag files as part of the AIP.
- Records PREMIS events documenting ingest and validation.
- Generates supplemental technical metadata (including file format identification, file size, and file modification date).
The AIP therefore contains:
- Original payload files preserved in their original formats.
- Original BagIt tag files (including manifests and bag-info metadata).
- Repository-managed preservation metadata.
- Object- and file-level metadata are maintained in the APTrust registry.
Because APTrust preserves original formats without normalization or migration, understandability at AIP creation depends on:
- Depositor-provided representation information consistent with the Knowledge Base of the Designated Community.
- Validation of completeness and fixity at ingest.
- Preservation of all contextual and technical metadata necessary to reconstruct and interpret the object.