International Journal of Digital Curation
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Privacy Impact Assessments for Digital Repositories
Full text linkTrustworthy data repositories ensure the security of their collections. We argue they should also ensure the security of researcher and human subject data. Here we demonstrate the use of a privacy impact assessment (PIA) to evaluate potential privacy risks to researchers using the ICPSR’s Open Badges Research Credential System as a case study. We present our workflow and discuss potential privacy risks and mitigations for those risks.
[This paper is a conference pre-print presented at IDCC 2020 after lightweight peer review.] 
Extending the Research Data Toolkit: Data Curation Primers
Full text linkNiche and proprietary data formats used in cutting-edge research and technology have specific curation considerations and challenges. The increased demand for subject liaisons, library archivists, and digital curators to curate this variety of data types created locally at an institution or organization poses difficulties. Subject liaisons possess discipline knowledge and expertise for a given domain or discipline and digital curation experts know how to properly steward data assets generally. Yet, a gap often exists between the expertise available within the organization and local curation needs.
While many institutions and organizations have expertise in certain domains and areas, oftentimes the heterogeneous data types received for deposit extend beyond this expertise. Additionally, evolving research methods and new, cutting-edge technology used in research often result in unfamiliar and niche data formats received for deposit. Knowing how to ‘get-started’ in curating these file types and formats can be a particular challenge. To address this need, the data curation community have been developing a new set of tools – data curation primers. These primers are evolving documents that detail a specific subject, disciplinary area or curation task, and that can be used as a reference or jump-start to curating research data. This paper will provide background on the data curation primers and their content detail the process of their development, highlight the data curation primers published to date, emphasize how curators can incorporate these resources into workflows, and show curators how they can get involved and share their own expertise
Human Security Informatics, Global Grand Challenges and Digital Curation
Full text linkThis paper argues that addressing humanitarian issues and concerns about social and societal inequities that are integral to many societal grand challenges needs to become a concerted and sustained focus of digital curation. It proposes a new framing emanating out of the archival and record-keeping community – Human Security Informatics (HSI) – for human and humanitarian-centered rather than data, artifact or research-centered digital curation research and development. Human security is proposed as a new concept that promotes the protection and advancement of individuals and communities. It prioritizes individual agency and rights, and human-centered and multidisciplinary approaches that support democratization, transparency and accountability in trans- and supra-national governance and policy-making. Within this ethos, HSI specifically targets data, documentary, record-keeping and other accountability and evidentiary components of societal grand challenges. In so doing it necessarily highlights curation grand challenges, and demands the reorientation of some fundamental assumptions of digital curation relating to technological, economic and policy infrastructure priorities and standards, trust, scale, universality and content-centricity. To illustrate its argument, two research endeavors are discussed. The first is an Archival Education and Research Initiative (AERI) study that analyzed six areas of societal grand challenges and identified key, and often overlooked, areas where HSI could and should contribute. The analysis also surfaced grand challenges facing the digital curation community itself, many with particular applicability to digital curation capacity, processes and priorities in bureaucratic archives. The second is the Refugee Rights in Records (R3) Project, an example of wide-ranging HSI research that is focused on data, social media content and record-keeping, as well as on individual human rights in and to records and documentation. In both examples the paper identifies several specific areas of relevance to digital curation where an HSI approach would be appropriate
Navigating Unmountable Media with the Digital Forensics XML File System
Full text linkSome computer storage is non-navigable by current general-purpose computers. This could be because of obsolete interface software, or a more specialized storage system lacking widespread support. These storage systems may contain artifacts of great cultural, historical, or technical significance, but implementing compatible interfaces that are fully navigable may be beyond available resources.
We developed the DFXML File System (DFXMLFS) to enable navigation of arbitrary storage systems that fulfill a minimum feature set of the POSIX file system standard. Our approach advocates for a two-step workflow that separates parsing the storage’s file system structures from navigating the storage like a contemporary file system, including file contents. The parse extracts essential file system metadata, serializing to Digital Forensics XML for later consumption as a read-only file system
Increasing the Reuse of Data through FAIR-enabling the Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories
Full text linkThe long-term preservation of digital objects, and the means by which they can be reused, are addressed by both the FAIR Data Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and a number of standards bodies providing Trustworthy Digital Repository (TDR) certification, such as the CoreTrustSeal. Though many of the requirements listed in the Core Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements 2020–2022 Extended Guidance address the FAIR Data Principles indirectly, there is currently no formal ‘FAIR Certification’ offered by the CoreTrustSeal or other TDR standards bodies. To address this gap the FAIRsFAIR project developed a number of tools and resources that facilitate the assessment of FAIR-enabling practices at the repository level as well as the FAIRness of datasets within them. These include the CoreTrustSeal+FAIRenabling Capability Maturity model (CTS+FAIR CapMat), a FAIR-Enabling Trustworthy Digital Repositories-Capability Maturity Self-Assessment template, and F-UJI , a web-based tool designed to assess the FAIRness of research data objects. The success of such tools and resources ultimately depends upon community uptake. This requires a community-wide commitment to develop best practices to increase the reuse of data and to reach consensus on what these practices are. One possible way of achieving community consensus would be through the creation of a network of FAIR-enabling TDRs, as proposed by FAIRsFAIR