This month the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) announced the completion of an audit of the Portico digital repository and its certification as a trustworthy digital repository. Portico is the first digital preservation service to undergo this independent audit and the only service to be certified at this time.

This is a crucial milestone for Portico, and one we hope will provide libraries and publishers with even greater confidence in our ability to serve your preservation needs over the long term. Digital preservation requires ongoing and meticulous focus and care to ensure that a service’s organizational structure, practices, and processes are appropriate to the task and transparent to the community it serves. We volunteered for Portico to undergo the CRL audit process to obtain an outside check by members of our community both to help us improve and to provide you with another way to verify the quality and sustainability of the Portico service.

The nine-month audit process was an extremely positive and valuable one for Portico. It confirmed that the majority of our practices conform to the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification Checklist (TRAC) and other metrics developed by CRL through its analyses of digital repositories. It also identified for us several areas for continued improvement as well as ways in which we can enhance the service for CRL member libraries as well as others. We look forward to continuing to report to CRL on these issues in the years ahead to ensure we continue to meet certification requirements and the expectations of CRL libraries, our other partner libraries, and our participating publishers.

We invite you to review the background information about CRL’s Certification and Assessment of Digital Repositories Program as well as the public audit report on Portico published by the CRL Certification Advisory Panel.

Should you have questions about the audit or the result, or if you would like additional information about Portico more generally, please contact us.