Repositories and Beyond: Analysis of Survey for SSHOC Organisations

This report forms part of the overall body of work conducted by the SSHOC Task 8.2 Trust & Quality Assurance, Impact team which was tasked with examining the trust landscape of organisations participating in SSHOC and from the wider SSH domain. This report will examine the results of a survey targeted at organisations within the SSHOC community which offer services covering data and/or metadata. The survey was conducted in the summer of 2021. Areas examined by the survey include the type of data and/or metadata stored by the organisations, the support (and wider data) services offered by the organisations, certification status, data discovery provision and availability of repository information, amongst others.

The results highlight the diversity of the trust landscape and illustrate the differences between SSH repositories and wider data service providers. The results also highlight potential differences between certified and non-certified repositories in the availability of policies and documentation. Differing interpretations of policies and the variation in the terminology related to data integrity suggests that further work is needed to achieve a community consensus on the definitions of services and service components and the minimum acceptable level of information that data-holding organisations should provide to users and other stakeholders.

The plurality of data-holding organisations across the SSH landscape raises the issue of whether certification and/or assessment solutions are needed for wider data service providers that do not fit the ‘traditional data repository’ model, thus being ineligible for CoreTrustSeal certification.