On building trusted digital preservation repositories

Trusted digital repository audit checklists are now being developed, based on assessments of organizational infrastructure, repository functions, community use, and technical infrastructure. These assessments can be expressed as rules that are applied on state information that define the criteria for trustworthiness. This paper maps the rules to the mechanisms that are needed in a trusted digital repository to minimize risk of both data and state information loss. The required mechanisms have been developed within the Storage Resource Broker data grid technology, and their use is illustrated on existing preservation repository projects.