Risk management foundations for digital libraries: DRAMBORA (Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment)

This paper proposes the use of the DRAMBORA (Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment), the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) audit toolkit for digital repositories, as a tool to ensure the preservation capabilities of digital libraries. Digital repositories lie at the heart of digital libraries: ensuring long-term sustainability of their content is a fundamental responsibility of a digital library system and environment. DRAMBORA is designed to facilitate the assessment of digital repositories’ risk exposure: it facilitates internal audit by providing repository administrators with a means to assess their capabilities, identify their weaknesses, and recognize their strengths. The toolkit represents the latest complementary development in an ongoing international effort to conceive criteria, means and methodologies for audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories. DRAMBORA already includes the ten CRL principles for digital preservation repositories. As part of the ongoing developments of the toolkit we are investigating its applicability within the digital library domain, and the identification of core principles of digital preservation that can be incorporated into the DELOS Digital Library Reference Model, to ensure that digital libraries conforming to the reference model have preservation functionality.