The IMS repository contains (and accepts) only non-proprietary, text-based data formats, making for low curation requirements to ensure long-term preservation considering data content.
Depositors must sign a Depositor's agreement with the University of Stuttgart, which ensures that they own all necessary rights required to deposit the data, that they are in compliance with all relevant national and international legal regulations, and that they grant the repository permission to distribute the data in accordance with the access model chosen (public or academic). Data providers retain all intellectual property rights to their data. In case a violation of conditions is observed, steps will be taken to ensure that the data is not distributed until the issue can be resolved.
The depositor's agreement informs about the repository's responsibilies in the context of a long-term preservation:
- storage of the data (sustainable, legible, accessible)
- data preservation in unchanged form (as far as possible)
- access to third parties (public or restricted academic access)
- remove data from the archive (if necessary)
- move data to a cooperating CLARIN centre or a similar infrastructure (in case of cessation of the hosting service)
Technical preservation arrangements:
- integrity tests of data stored
- periodical local and distributed backups (located in dedicated computing centers with strict access control)
- repeated testing of reinstalling the repository from backup
- administrator access to the repository is limited to a small group of trained experts
The repository backend was selected for ease of long-term maintenance and compliance to best practice. It has low technical requirements for extracting the resources from the system without additional and proprietary software, making the transfer of the data to new hardware straight-forward. Long-term access is ensured by the hardware, open protocols, and organizational embedding in sustainable departmental structures of the university.