Designated Community: uncertainty and risk
| Date | 23 November 2022 |
| Pages | 880-897 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2022-0161 |
| Published date | 23 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Rebecca D. Frank,Laura Rothfritz |
Designated Community:
uncertainty and risk
Rebecca D. Frank
School of Information Sciences, The University of Tennessee Knoxville,
Knoxville, Tennessee, USA and
Einstein Center Digital Future, Berlin, Germany, and
Laura Rothfritz
Berlin School of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-Universit€
at zu Berlin,
Berlin, Germany
Abstract
Purpose –This article explores the tension between the concept of a Designated Community (DC) as a
foundational element in Trustworthy Digital Repository (TDR) certification and curators’uncertainty about
how to interpret and apply this concept in practice.
Design/methodology/approach –This research employs a qualitative research design involving in-depth semi-
structured interviews with stakeholders in the Trustworthy Digital Repository Audit and Certification (TRAC)
process.
Findings –The authors’findings indicate that stakeholders in the audit and certification process viewed their
uncertainty about how to apply the concept of a DC in the context of an audit as a source of risk for digital
repositories and the repositories’collections.
Originality/value –This article brings new insights to digital preservation by applying social theories of risk
to trustworthy digital repository audit and certification processes, with an emphasis on the concept of DC.
Keywords Designated Community, Digital preservation, Trustworthy Digital Repository, ISO 16363, OAIS,
Risk, Uncertainty
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Digital repositories are places where the important work of preserving digital content takes
place. There are many decisions that people who do this work have to make, but one of the most
important is deciding who should be able to access, understand, and use the information that
they are preserving. This decision drives many other choices and as such can have an outsized
influence on preservation processes and can determine the success of digital preservation efforts.
A basic definition of Designated Community(DC) is: the group or groups of consumers for
whom a digital repository is preserving information. A key reason for defining a DC is to set
parameters for repository staff as they make preservation decisions. This concept was
introducedin the Open ArchivalInformation System(OAIS) model (Consultative Committeefor
Space Data Systems, 2012), and is foundational to several systems for trustworthy digital
repository (TDR) audit and certification, including Trustworthy Digital Repository Audit and
Certification (TRAC), ISO 16363, CoreTrustSeal, and nestor (Consultative Committee for Space
Data Systems, 2011,2012;CoreTrustSeal Standards And Certification Board, 2019;nestor
Working Group Trusted Repositories - Certification, 2009;RLG-NARA Digital Repository
JD
79,4
880
Theauthors would liketo thank Dr. ElizabethYakel, Ph.D.,Dr. Paul Conway,Ph.D., Dr. PaulCourant, Ph.D.
and Dr. Shobita Parthasarathy, Ph.D. for the feedback and guidance at various stages of this project.
The authorswould also like to thankMegh Marathe and Carl Haynesfor the assistancewith data analysis.
Funding: This researchwas funded in part by a Universityof Michigan Rackham Graduate Student
Research Grant. This researchwas also partly funded bythe Einstein Center DigitalFuture.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 22 July 2022
Revised 21 October 2022
Accepted 26 October 2022
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 79 No. 4, 2023
pp. 880-897
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-07-2022-0161
Certification Task Force, 2007). In each of these systems, a repository is expected to clearly
define the group of future consumers who should be able to access and understand the
repository’s preserved digital content. Other repository policies and practicesare evaluated in
terms of how well they meet the need s of the DC.
Despitethe centralityof this conceptfor repository certification,the DC is poorly understood.
We arguethat uncertaintyabout the DC in the contextof a repository auditinfluences theways
in which stakeholders construct their understanding of risk, focusing onTRAC certification.
In this article we explore the tension between the centrality of DCs in the TRAC
certification process on one hand, and the uncertainty about how to apply this concept in
practice on the other. We ask:
(1) How do stakeholders in TDR certification understand the concept of the DC?
(2) How do those stakeholders construct their understanding of risk with regard to DCs?
Our findings indicate that: (1) standard developers and auditors viewed the DC as a
foundational element of the TRAC certification process, (2) standard developers, auditors,
and repository staff members who discussed DCs expressed uncertainty about the concept,
including how to interpret this requirement for repositories in the context of certification, and
(3) uncertainty about the DC concept was described as a source of risk for digital repositories.
2. Background/literature review
2.1 Designated Communities
The concept of a DC was introduced in the OAIS model (i.e. ISO 14721), which outlines
requirements for digital repositories that engage in long-term preservation (Consultative
Committee for Space Data Systems, 2012). The OAIS model forms the basis for several TDR
certification processes, which all take different approaches to evaluating how well a given
repository conforms to the OAIS model. In this article we focus on the role that the DC plays in
TRAC certification, a process discussed in greater detail below.
The OAIS model defines DC as:
An identified group of potential Consumers who should be able to understand a particular set of
information. The Designated Community may be composed of multiple user communities.
A Designated Community is defined by the Archive and this definition may change over time.
(Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, 2012, pp. 1–11)
There are two key elements to this definition that we would like to emphasize:first, the DC refers to
potential consumers, which means that members of the DC do not necessarily act as immediate
consumers of the information but rather are people or systems who should be able to access and
use this information at some point in the future, because “the primary goal of an OAIS is to
preserve information for a Designated Community over an indefinite period of time”(Consultative
Committee for Space Data Systems, 2012, pp. 4–20).Second, the DC should not be s eenas one static
group of future consumers but may consist of multiple communities or systems that “share an
identifiable set of characteristics which can be used as a reference when executing curation or
preservation actions”(Moles, 2019, p. 24). This means that the DC can include current users –
people or systems –but there is an emphasis on potential rather than current use for decision
making.
The DC forms the basis for preservation decisions. Choices about, for example, which
representation information to capture, which modes of access to support and which file formats
to use, dependon what will best meetthe needs and expectations of the DC. As such,having a
well-defined DC, that repository stakeholders understand, is important for a repository whose
staff want to demonstrate compliance with the OAIS model through TDR certification.
Designated
Community
and risk
881
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