Standards Adoption

When the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) undertook a lengthy requirements analysis process in 2011, an underlying motivation was to ensure that the Repository was built following the best international practice available, with a particular eye to choosing solutions that are widely adopted or endorsed by peer organisations and professionals practicing digital archiving and preservation.  Standards adoption is key to sustainability, and to enabling interoperability. Standards adoption goes beyond issues of metadata standards or standard file formats, but covers all aspects of the DRI’s work, including our organisational structure, our technical architecture, the persistent identifiers we have adopted, as well as the policies and professional networks that frame our work. Below we outline some of the standards, or social frameworks for standards, that we have adopted.

OAIS and Repository Certification

The organisational structure of DRI was influenced by the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) (PDF file, 1.9MB). An OAIS consists of

[A]n organization, which may be part of a larger organization, of people and systems that has accepted the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a designated community.

Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, 2012

The Reference Model establishes a common framework of terms and concepts which constitute a digital repository and lays out the functional components and responsibilities of such a repository at an organisational level.

DRI obtained the Data Seal of Approval in 2015 and its successor CoreTrustSeal in 2018. CoreTrustSeal is an international, community based, non-governmental, and non-profit organisation promoting sustainable and trustworthy data infrastructures. Certification is based on the Data Seal of Approval (DSA)-World Data Systems (WDS) Core Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements catalogue and procedures, which lays out the core characteristics of trustworthy data repositories. Certification demonstrates that DRI has the policies and procedures in place to ensure long-term preservation and custodianship of data.

FAIR and Open Data

The Repository is designed to make data FAIR, that is, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. The steps that we have taken to ensure this are described in more detail on our Statement on FAIR Principles page. We are continuing to enhance FAIR support within the Repository, for example, via the recent implementation of FAIR Signposting as part of the FAIR-IMPACT project.

DRI supports the TRUST Principles for digital repositories. These principles offer guidance for maintaining the trustworthiness of digital repositories, especially those responsible for the stewardship of research data. The steps that we have taken to ensure that we comply with the TRUST Principles are described in more detail on our Statement on TRUST Principles page.

DRI has endorsed the National Framework on the Transition to an Open Research Environment and supports Ireland’s National Open Research Forum (NORF) in a range of ways, detailed on our DRI and NORF page.

On Tuesday 23rd of October 2012, the National Principles for Open Access Policy Statement was launched by Sean Sherlock, TD, Minister of State, Department of Enterprise, Jobs & Innovation and Department of Education & Skills, at our Realising the Opportunities of Digital Humanities workshop. The statement was prepared by the National Steering Committee on Open Access Policy, of which the DRI was a member. The committee was working in partnership to coordinate activities and to combine expertise at a national level to promote unrestricted, online access to outputs which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the State.

Registries and Organisational Identifiers

In line with best practice, the DRI and the Repository are registered with a number of repository and research organisation registries, providing organisational identifiers and allowing researchers and others to find the DRI and get information on the types of data we hold.

• Re3data.org
• OpenDOAR/Sherpa
• FAIRsharing.org
• FAIRsFAIR Repository Finder
• MERIL
• OpenAIRE Explore
• Europeana
• Ror.org

Persistent Identifiers

DRI is committed to the use of Persistent Identifiers. All objects in the Repository receive a persistent Digital Object Identifier (DOI) via DataCite.

We also support and encourage the use of Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCID) to identify the creators and contributors to digital objects. ORCIDs can be included in the metadata records when an object is ingested allowing for the unique identification and disambiguation of researchers and their data publications.

Several of the repository or organisational registries mentioned in the section above also issue persistent identifiers which uniquely identify the DRI as an organisation.

Open Source Software

DRI also supports and uses Open Source software wherever possible. This includes the use of the Samvera Repository Framework as well as the publication of all DRI code on GitHub under an open source licence.

Technical Standards

DRI has implemented a number of technical standards to enhance interoperability. This includes support for ingesting metadata in the most popular metadata standards in use by our designated communities in Ireland – Dublin Core, Qualified Dublin Core, MODS, MARC, and EAD.

We also use the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to make our images interoperable with other IIIF platforms and tools.

We support export of data in the BagIt format, as well as providing an OAI-PMH feed for our metadata in Dublin Core and the Europeana Data Model (EDM). Metadata and data can also be accessed via a standards-compliant Application Programming Interface (API).