New Delhi, India Jan 11-13 2017

C-DAC logoThe Indian Centre of Excellence for Digital Preservation (C-DAC, http://www.cdac.in/) has organised a high level course on Audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories in association with PTAB.


The digital preservation initiative and the first ever course on Audit and Certification of Trusted Digital Repositories in India stands at the crux where it is crucial to fill up the gap between the Digital India Programme and the challenges posed by rampant technological obsolescence, to make it a truly sustainable vision. The Digital India Programme is going to generate a huge amount of the information which is encoded in bits. Keeping those bits is not trivial but this can at least be checked. Making sure the information that is trapped in those bits can be used, despite changes in technology and human tacit knowledge, is much more difficult – yet it is essential. If in 50 years’ time a repository still has the bits but cannot get at the information will surely have failed. How can anyone know that a repository can be trusted to preserve digitally encoded information? Funders of repositories and those who entrust their valuable digitally encoded information to them urgently need to know whether their funds and their faith is well founded. Stakeholders need to know if the repository is worthy of trust.The ISO 16363 and 16919 standards have been created to allow auditors with the right competences to work within the tried and tested ISO process to make that evaluation in an unbiased way, just as we depend on the ISO process for so many things on which we depend in our everyday lives from medical equipment to food safety to aeroplane safety.

This course will equip the attendees with the knowledge about how these evaluations should be carried out and the benefits of digital preservation can be fully capitalized.


The Primary Trustworthy Digital Repository Authorisation Body (ISO-PTAB) plays a major role in training auditors and repository managers. There are three important ISO standards:

  • ISO 14721:2012 (OAIS – a reference model for what is required for an archive to provide long-term preservation of digital information)
  • ISO 16363:2013 (Audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories – sets out comprehensive metrics for what an archive must do, based on OAIS)
  • ISO 16919:2014 (Requirements for bodies providing audit and certification of candidate trustworthy digital repositories – specifies the competencies and requirements on auditing bodies)

These three standards form a closely related family and an understanding of their principles and is becoming increasingly important in establishing an internationally recognised and certified set of Trustworthy Digital Repositories. Many national and commercial repositories are preparing for certification and legislation is already in place in Italy requiring repositories to be certified. It is important to ensure you have the knowledge to ensure your data is trustworthy and accessible in the future and a certified internationally recognised ISO certified repository will give your organisation/clients the confidence and reassurance that their data has been audited by an independent body to the highest standards. The correct training in preparation for certification is essential and there is no other organisation to equal the knowledge of PTAB in this area as the tutors are the authors of these standards.

The course is divided into modules, each of which consists of a presentation, practical exercises and discussion and C-DAC will present case studies and demonstrate the Electronic Records Management and Archival System.

The full details and registration page are available at http://www.ndpp.in/national-international-events/high-level-course-on-iso16363.

The registration fee is Rs. 23,000 (about 340 US Dollars) inclusive of taxes.