A new distinction for ICPSR: CoreTrustSeal Certification!
The international CoreTrustSeal Board recently approved the certification of ICPSR as a core certified repository. CoreTrustSeal assesses data repositories with the objective of making repository practices and procedures transparent, and assuring that valuable digital assets are protected.
Claims of trustworthiness are easy to make, but more difficult to justify or objectively prove. Acquiring CoreTrustSeal certification makes transparent to our stakeholders, including funding agencies now encouraging certification, the trustworthiness of our repository. Certification also improves our internal processes and documentation.
CoreTrustSeal replaces the Data Seal of Approval (DSA) certification and World Data System (WDS) Regular Members certification. ICPSR was one of the first six data repositories to earn the Data Seal of Approval in 2011. ICPSR earned the World Data System certification in 2013. In 2006, ICPSR was a test case for Trusted Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC, now ISO 16363). Data repository certification was initially recommended by a 1996 Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information, which declared, “a critical component of digital archiving infrastructure is the existence of a sufficient number of trusted organizations capable of storing, migrating, and providing access to digital collections ... a process of certification for digital archives is needed to create an overall climate of trust about the prospects of preserving digital information.”
Margaret Hedstrom, ICPSR Faculty Associate and Robert M Warner Collegiate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan, played an important role in defining and promoting trusted repositories. Mary Vardigan, ICPSR Archivist Emerita, and Nancy McGovern, ICPSR Adjust Archivist and Director, Digital Preservation at MIT, played important roles in earlier ICPSR certifications.
Sep 9, 2019