Collaboration and Trust in Digital Preservation

In Toward Distributed Infrastructures for Digital Preservation: The Roles of Collaboration and Trust, Michael Day explores the connections between collaboration and trust within the international scientific community. He outlines the growing need for collaboration, especially in scientific disciplines that deal with expensive and sophisticated instruments. Collaboration between several research teams over many years is often necessary to complete thorough and meaningful research. Drawing from another study, he outlines 4 types of scientific collaborations:

▪ Bureaucratic collaborations
▪ Leaderless collaborations
▪ Non-specialized collaborations
▪ Participatory collaborations

He suggests that data curation facilities are more likely to grow out of participatory collaboration efforts, which tend to be egalitarian in nature. His work also underscores one of the main themes we have been discussing all semester: that data curation projects are often created within disciplines or sub-disciplines and are confined to small communities that share data standards. Day acknowledged the importance of dealing with the social and legal implications of developing infrastructures for sharing data and collaborating. He takes up the subject of institutional repositories, but encourages collaboration across institutions and with other parties to increase preservation efforts. Day presents international initiatives to study and implement shared preservation environments.

Collaboration for digital preservation of scientific data requires a network of institutions that share trust. Day defines the relationship by stating that, “trust is at least partly about participants accepting a level of vulnerability in exchange for certain perceived benefits.” Trust often develops over time as institutions work together over a period of years and reach a level of expectation about the other’s reliability. Day relates trust to notions of control, describing the relationship as interdependent. Formal control mechanisms include policies, rules, and procedures, while informal controls can be simple shared institutional cultures. It is important to develop relationships of trust between institutions participating in digital curation initiatives. The trustworthiness of digital repositories is based on the strength of the institutions contributing data and participating in preservation efforts.

Finally, Day reviews various certification measures that may help establish a level of trust. He mentions the responsibilities set forth as the OAIS Reference model, discusses the RLG & OCLC published criteria for “trusted digital repositories,” and outlines the purpose of the RLG-NARA Digital Repository Certification Task Force.

The underlying theme of these initiatives is self-evaluation and definition. Repositories are encouraged to document policies, understand their own strengths and responsibilities, and consider more formal certification. The Digital Curation Centre has created a self-assessment toolkit, DCC Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA). The tool is designed to help institutions examine their strengths and weaknesses with an eye toward digital collaboration and risk management. The overarching theme of the article is that while collaboration is important and trust is necessary to adequately collaborate, an institution must thoroughly understand their contributions and roles in collaborating and must be aware of risks.