Repositories that become certified as Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs), “demonstrate to both their users and their funders that an independent authority has evaluated them and endorsed their trustworthiness”. Although there are currently over 2,400 data repositories covering a broad range of disciplines, only a few hundred are certified as Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs). These repositories span five continents and over 26 countries. Having the necessary technical, legal, financial, and organizational resources for digital preservation is a significant challenge.
This presentation reports on the first longitudinal study of TDR certification over a ten-year period (from 2010 to 2020) finding that many repositories either maintain a relatively high standard of trustworthiness in terms of their compliance with guidelines in TDR standards or improve their trustworthiness by raising their compliance levels with these guidelines each time they get recertified.