The repository shall have mechanisms in place for monitoring and notification when Representation Information is inadequate for the Designated Community to understand the data holdings.

This is necessary in order to ensure that the preserved information remains understandable and usable by the Designated Community.

Subscription to a Representation Information registry service; subscription to a technology watch service, surveys amongst its Designated Community members, relevant working processes to deal with this information.

This process begins in general with the repository’s mission statement and may be further specified in pre-accessioning agreements with producers or depositors (e.g., producer-archive agreements) and made very specific in deposit or transfer agreements for specific digital objects and their related documentation. For example, one repository may only commit to preserving the textual content of a document and not its exact appearance on a screen. Another may wish to preserve the exact appearance and layout of textual documents, while others may choose to keep the units of the measurement of data fields and to normalize the data during the ingest process. If unique identifiers are associated with digital objects before ingest, they may also be properties that need to be preserved.

See 4.3.2. and the Definition of AIP.

The APTrust Designated Community was approved at our 2018 Winter Member Meeting.

This page is linked on the Mandatory Responsibilities page.