TRUST Principles

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is a signatory of the TRUST Principles for digital repositories, which provide a common framework to facilitate discussion and implementation of best practice in digital preservation by all stakeholders. Below you will find information on how DRI implements each of the principles.

Transparency

The DRI has a policy framework and publishes policies in the Repository. These policies describe how the DRI operates, how digital objects are preserved, the various conditions for deposit and access, etc. The DRI and the Repository were built following the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model (ISO 14721) and the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification Criteria and Checklist (ISO16363). The Repository has obtained CoreTrustSeal certification and the CoreTrustSeal self-assessment document is available in the Repository.

Responsibility

The DRI supports a range of community supported metadata standards such as Dublin Core, Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), MAchine-Readable Cataloging (MARC), Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and the Europeana Data Model (EDM). Metadata is validated for correctness at ingest, and data and metadata are periodically validated. Although data depositors are responsible for curating their collections, the DRI provides a range of supports to ensure that high-quality metadata is captured, including training, documentation, guidelines and individual support.

Changes to metadata and data are tracked and objects are versioned on disk. Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) are issued to provide a persistent identifier to all published data. Data is discoverable and accessible via the Repository platform. Data and metadata are accessible in both human-readable and machine-readable forms and an Application Programming Interface (API) provides a range of search and access functionalities. All digital objects must have both a rights statement and a licence applied. Supported licences include the Creative Commons and other well-supported standard licence options. Although all metadata is publicly accessible under a CC0 or CC-BY licence, sensitive content can be restricted to approved users based on a robust authentication and authorisation model. All data and metadata is available for export by the depositor and by depositor-defined user groups.

User Focus

The Repository provides a number of tools to allow users to create and manage their data collections, such as a web-based ingest and edit form, a batch ingest tool and a number of additional tools to help with preparing collections and metadata. In order to ensure that content is easily discoverable and understandable, DRI encourages depositors to fully describe data at the time of deposition via training, documentation, guidelines, and automatic metadata validation. Users can search based on the metadata using the Repository web front end. The Repository is listed in a number of registries, as detailed on our Standards Adoption page. Individual collections are aggregated to other platforms such as Europeana to further facilitate data discovery.

DRI participates in a range of National and International fora to keep up-to-date with new developments, as well as organising a Members’ Forum to elicit feedback from members and monthly ‘DRI Coffee Mornings’ on current topics of interest.  Repository functionality is continually enhanced based on inputs and feedback received.

DRI provides extensive training and is committed to advocacy around best practices for research data management for both depositors and repository users.

Sustainability

The DRI is funded via a service level agreement with the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science (DFHERIS). The DRI is named as a key national infrastructure in the Department of Business, Enterprise and Industry Innovation 2020 strategy on research and development, and is home to Ireland’s National Open Research Forum. A key component of DRI’s sustainability plan is to remain research active in order to remain responsive to new developments. DRI collaborates with peer and complementary institutions to acquire additional research funding for projects that enhance core functions.

DRI’s governance structure includes the DRI Board, the Management Team and from 2021, an Expert Advisory Group which supersedes the founding International Advisory Board. The DRI Director reports to the DRI Board which is made up members of the archiving, academic and research communities. The Director chairs the Management Team which is made up of senior staff members across the three partner institutions of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and Maynooth University (MU). The Expert Advisory Group is made up of  national and international experts from across the cultural, heritage, arts, humanities and social science, research, archiving, digital preservation and technology communities. The group sits annually to provide advice on topics selected by DRI staff. DRI’s Preservation Policy provides more information on risk assessment, disaster recovery, business continuity and overall sustainability.

Technology

The Repository platform was built with ISO 14721, ISO16363 and other standards in mind. The code builds upon and uses a number of community standards and components and is released as open source. The Repository platform uses a robust authentication and authorisation module based on Ruby on Rails Devise and Cancan packages. Administrator access to all servers is via key-based SSH (secure shell) protocol. Servers are automatically patched with necessary security updates. A monitoring system based on Nagios alerts the administrators to any technical issues. All content is backed up regularly.