TRAC: B1.5: Gaining control of deposits

B1.5 Repository obtains sufficient physical control over the digital objects to preserve them.

The repository must obtain complete control of the bits of the digital objects conveyed with each SIP. For example, some SIPs may only reference digital objects and in such cases the repository must get the referenced digital objects if they constitute part of the object that the repository has committed to conserve. This will not always be the case: scholarly papers in a repository may contain references to other papers that are held in a different repository, or not held anywhere at all, and harvested Web sites may contain references to material in the same site or different sites that the repository has chosen not to capture or was unable to capture.

Evidence: Submission agreements/deposit agreements/deeds of gift; workflow documents; system log files from the system performing ingest procedures; logs of files captured during Web harvesting.

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This requirement is fairly straight-forward for ICPSR, given the type of content that we collect and curate. We gain complete control of the entire deposit, including both the research data and documentation. The deposit may also contain core related materials like the questionnaire that was used to collect the data.

That said, a deposit may be related to other objects outside the scope of ICPSR, such as publications related to the data. In this case ICPSR is not expecting to find such content in the deposit, nor would we tend to curate it even if it was present.