Info

About the Data Seal of Approval (DSA)

The Data Seal of Approval ensures that in the future, research data can still be processed in a high-quality and reliable manner, without this entailing new thresholds, regulations or high costs. The Data Seal of Approval and it's quality guidelines may be of interest to research institutions, organizations that archive data and to users of that data. It can be granted to any repository that applies for it via the assessment procedure.
 
Anyone who archives his or her data would like to be able to find, recognise and use it in the future. With electronic data this can not be taken for granted, after all hardware and software are changing all the time. Making data future-proof can be accomplished by ensuring that data sets and metadata meet certain requirements. In consultation with large data producers and managers, the Dutch data archive DANS documented what those requirements need to be in the Data Seal of Approval, which have been further developed since and handed over to the DSA Assessment Board on .

The quality guidelines of this seal of approval for data are intended to ensure that in the future, research data can still be processed in a high-quality and reliable manner, without this entailing new thresholds, regulations or high costs. The guidelines may be of interest to research institutions, organizations that archive data and to users of that data. You can download the document that contains the quality guidelines of the Data Seal of Approval below.

Contact: info@datasealofapproval.org

Blogs about the DSA:

IASSIST: Research information network:
http://iassistblog.org/?p=94 http://www.rin.ac.uk/node/499


The importance of digital preservation according to Digital Preservation europe.eu:

Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster: An Animation

AttachmentSize
DSA booklet_2-0_engels_mei2010.pdf1 MB
DSA_informationfolder_web.pdf2.22 MB

News



TRACking the Evidence: ICPSR Begins Self-Assessment

15 July 2010

In the Spring of 2010, ICPSR began a self-assessment exercise to document evidence for meeting the requirements of the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC) checklist. The requirements fell under these major headings[1]:

    •    A1. Governance and Organizational Viability
    •    A2. Organizational Structure and Staffing
    •    A3. Procedural Accountability and Policy Framework
    •    A4. Financial Sustainability
    •    A5. Contracts, Licenses, and Liabilities
    •    B1. Ingest: Acquisition of Content
    •    B2. Ingest: Creation of the Archival Package
    •    B3. Preservation Planning
    •    B4. Archival Storage and Preservation/Maintenance of AIPs
    •    B5. Information Management
    •    B6. Access Management
    •    C1. System Infrastructure 
Process
Guided by ICPSR Digital Preservation Officer Nancy McGovern, we listed each TRAC requirement on its own page on the ICPSR Intranet. Groups at ICPSR were then assigned responsibility to document these requirements on the Intranet pages. For example, the ICPSR Dissemination Committee, which I chair, was given responsibility to document the requirements related to access. The groups were then directed to rate the level of compliance with each requirement on a rating system from 0 to 4:
0=non-compliant
1=slightly compliant
2=half compliant
3=mostly compliant
4=fully compliant
 
 
Findings
The Dissemination Committee recognized early in the process that ICPSR needed an explicit Access Policy in order to comply with several of the TRAC requirements, so our group drafted such a policy, which was subsequently approved and posted. This was a good outcome as it creates greater transparency for the ICPSR repository in terms of how it grants access to data and other products.
 
Of the 12 requirements for which the Dissemination Committee is assembling evidence, most have received a rating of about a 3, or “mostly compliant.” The TRAC criteria are demanding and we know that the organization has a ways to go to be fully compliant with the requirements.
 
We are still in the process of understanding ICPSR’s level of compliance across the organization and there will be a full discussion of TRAC at the next meeting of the ICPSR Council in October 2010. ICPSR hopes to provide a report to the community on its experience with TRAC, its findings, and future directions.

Mary Vardigan (ICPSR)


[1] Note that these requirements reflect the public TRAC version in use at the time, pending the ISO version, but we will ultimately align with the ISO version.