Keith Russell¹, Andrew Mehnert^2,3 , Heather Leasor⁴, Mikaela Lawrence⁵

¹Australian Research Data Commons

²National Imaging Facility, Australia, andrew.mehnert@uwa.edu.au

³Centre for Microscopy, Characterisation and Analysis, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia

⁴Australian National University

⁵CSIRO

DESCRIPTION

In FY 2016/17, ANDS funded the Trusted Data Repository program. This aimed to look at how to provide more trusted storage through three projects chosen to examine a number of dimensions:

• NIF: multi-institutional (UQ, MU, UNSW, UWA), image/non-image instrument data, data generating facilities
• ADA: single institution (ANU), social science data, data holding facility with a national role
• CSIRO: single institution (not a university), range of data types, institutional data store

The primary focus of the program was on the trustedness of the repository containers, not on the data they contained. In other words Trusted (Data Repositories) not (Trusted Data) Repositories. However In the case of the NIF project they did consider both aspects: (1) Requirements necessary and sufficient for a basic NIF trusted data repository service; and (2) NIF Agreed Process (NAP) to obtain trusted data from NIF instruments.

The main challenges addressed across the program were how to:

• Make necessary changes to the existing storage infrastructure
• Enhance the data management/curation processes within the organisation (or at least the part that interacts with the storage)
• Assess and improve the trustedness of the data infrastructure by working through the Repository Audit and Certification / DSA–WDS Partnership Working Group catalogue of common procedures (now the CoreTrustSeal procedures), identifying the main bottlenecks to achieving certification and the effort involved (see also the ADA presentation on this at Open Repositories 2017)
• Accommodate legal and commercial considerations in addition to the accreditation requirements

In this BoF, the projects will present what they learned by undertaking this journey and reflect on how to generalize what they learned to the national context (noting that NIF is a national facility, ADA is a national repository, and CSIRO is a national agency).

Following this there will be an open discussion about next steps, including how to expand this initial set of projects to a national infrastructure of trusted data repositories serving a range of domains.

Format

The BoF will be a mix of presentation of content via slides (contributed by Love, McEachern and Mehnert), followed by an open discussion among all those presenting (facilitated by Treloar).

Timing

0-10: Overview of Trusted Data Repository (TDR) program run in 2017 and international relevance

10-40: 3 ten minute presentations from each of the pilot TDR projects

50-60: Role of Trusted Data Repositories in the NRDC

60-75: Open discussion

75-80: Next steps