On January 16th, 2012, OCUL’s Scholars Portal Journal platform began the formal audit process to become certified as a Trustworthy Digital Repository. This process will continue with an on-site visit on April 17th and 18th.
The audit, being carried out by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), will measure Scholars Portal’s administrative oversight; processes for digital object management; and infrastructure, security, & risk management strategies against the newly certified ISO 16363 standard. CRL has previously conducted audits of Portico, HathiTrust, and, most recently, Chronopolis.
The audit process is the culmination of over two years of work, kicked off by OCUL’s Trusted Digital Repository Steering Committee, to ensure the Integrity, Authenticity and Usability of the materials in our collection now and in the future. This work led to the creation of preservation policies, enhancements to existing infrastructure, and new platform interface features including the ability to view digital preservation metadata including checksum values and the object's chain of custody from the time it was loaded into Scholars Portal. To date metadata has been loaded for over 2.5 million articles.
A preliminary findings report is expected from CRL in June 2012 with a final audit report following in August. We will communicate findings as they are made available to us.
Learn more about OCUL’s Preservation initiatives.
About Ontario Council of University Libraries
OCUL is a consortium of Ontario’s 21 university libraries. Our strength lies in our commitment to work together to maximize our collective expertise and resources. We enhance information services in Ontario and beyond through collective purchasing and shared digital information infrastructure, collaborative planning, advocacy, assessment, research, partnerships, communications, and professional development.
Building on an established record of leadership in the shared development of innovative digital library services and collections, OCUL will support Canada’s knowledge economy by providing the information tools and access essential for high quality education and research in Ontario’s universities.
OCUL Contact: Kathy Scardellato, Executive Director, kathy.scardellato@ocul.on.ca
About Scholars Portal
Scholars Portal provides the technological infrastructure that preserves and provides access to information resources collected and shared by Ontario’s 21 university libraries.
Through Scholars Portal’s online services, Ontario’s University students, faculty and researchers have access to millions of e-journal articles and an extensive collection of e-books and social science data sets. Scholars Portal also offers an online inter-library loan platform for Ontario’s universities as well as providing support for the RefWorks and WizFolio citation management systems and other tools designed to aid and enhance academic research in Ontario.
Scholars Portal Contact: Steve Marks, Digital Preservation Librarian, steve@scholarsportal.info
About Center for Research Libraries
The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries. Founded in 1949, CRL supports advanced research and teaching in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences by preserving and making available to scholars the primary source material critical to those disciplines.
CRL acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional and digital resources from a global network of sources. Most materials acquired are from outside the United States, and many are from five “emerging” regions of the world: Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Latin America.