[Moims-rac] scope for RAC

[Nancy McGovern]

I was on the road much of October and am on my last trip for a while, so I'll miss the call today.  I should be back on calls mostly after today.  
 
Over the past weeks, I have been reviewing the call notes with interest.  It does seem like a good time to step back and consider the scope of the standard to be developed.  International standards take a number of forms.  Consider the different approaches of the ISO 9000 family, OAIS, ISO 15489, for example.  
 
During the TRAC discussions, we defined a set of requirements (the what) for a trusted digital repository.  The RAC group started with the TRAC requirements as a first step.  We are almost through a review of the TRAC requirements.  Candida posted a very helpful review of the status of that review.  We will hopefully complete that review soon.
 
TRAC discussions distinguished between self-assessment based on the TRAC requriements, audit by an outside party, and formal certification; the TRAC requirements forming the basis for all three of these.  The discussions of authenticity, provenance, and mandatory seem to jump into the how discussion from the what and raise the need for considering the scope of the ulitmate proposed standard.  TRAC was a good starting point for the what discussion and DRAMBORA and nestor, for example, both offer important contributions for the how discussion - how will organizations engage in the sequence of self-assessment, audit, and certification.  
 
In the TRAC discussions, we often spoke of defining levels of certification using numerical or other ratings to indicate basic compliance and so on and we identified the value in having communities to define scenarios for their communities (e.g., for archival records audit and certification might look like this, for libraries, like this).  We ran into the difficulty of determining these levels and the TRAC document was limited a set of requirements with the introductory text, evidence examples, supporting text, and appendices providing a sense of the how.
 
The discussion of mandatory requirements will no doubt produce interesting results and it may turn out that our group results might be best packaged in the form of the set of revised requirements; audit guidelines, results, and scenarios; and certification levels and logistics - or something like that.  Identifying mandatory requirements for all trusted digital repositories in the varying contexts in which they exist is challenging.  It may prove that audit scenarios for dominant contexts provide a means for determining mandatory requirements in each context.  The TRAC requirements relied upon the audit process to determine the set of relevant requriements to be used in each case.  
 
I'll look forward to seeingt the notes from today's discussion and to the call next week.
Nance
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