Fostering Trust in Data Repositories: National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Strategy and Results

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) offers a variety of data services to support its community, including a number of data repositories. In addition to several extant repositories, NCAR's Data Stewardship Engineering Team (DSET) is also in the process of creating a new Digital Asset Services Hub (DASH) Repository to complement the existing data repositories' services as well as to augment NCAR's overall data management capabilities.

Since NCAR's data repositories aim to meet the needs of the NCAR community for the long term, being able to assess and enhance the repositories' services and their maturity levels in a systematic manner is a top priority. Additionally, for the upcoming DASH Repository, being able to design and implement the repository according to best practices for data repositories is crucial for its success.

This talk will present the process that the NCAR DSET used in order to select and evaluate a set of trusted repository criteria and recommendations, including the CoreTrustSeal and Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC): Criteria and Checklist . As a result of this process, the NCAR DSET compiled a checklist that can help an NCAR-managed data repository in reviewing the areas for improving its trustworthiness. Finally, the talk will discuss how this checklist has been applied to the DASH Repository's design and implementation process to ensure its roadmap to becoming a trusted repository.