The repository shall specify minimum information requirements to enable the Designated Community to discover and identify material of interest.

This is necessary in order to enable discovery of the repository’s holdings.

Retrieval and descriptive information, discovery metadata, such as Dublin Core, and other documentation describing the object.

The repository should be able to deal with the types of requests that will come from a typical user from the Designated Community. A repository does not necessarily have to satisfy every possible request. Retrieval metadata is distinct from descriptive information that describes what has been found.

The number of required tag files is minimal. Institutions can add as many tag files as they want and these tag files will be preserved. Source-Organization, Bagging-Date, Bag-Count fields must be filled out, while the following fields must be present but can be blank: Internal-Sender-Description. Title and Access information (consortia, restricted, or institution) are required to be present in the aptrust-info.txt file. See the Bagging specifications for additional information.

In the UI, one can search by title, Bag Name and object identifier. Depositors have the option of providing an alternate identifier.

The typical user is not looking for descriptive metadata to discover the repository’s holdings as access to this repository is limited to staff involved with digital preservation. Typical users are relying upon their unique bag ids to find the object within APTrust. Each institution will develop their own policies regarding how and where they describe the content in the bags—some may choose, for example, to add descriptive metadata to a readme file inside the bag; some may choose to add additional tag files; some may choose to keep most descriptive metadata in a local environment only. APTrust is flexible and can accommodate all of these options.

This page is linked on the Mandatory Responsibilities page.