Checklist for Appraising Research Data for Long-term Preservation

The checklist (v1) presented here was designed to accompany the appraisal guidance published by members of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada's Preservation Expert Group in 2022, Appraisal Guidance for the Preservation of Research Data. It was developed specifically to aid curators and preservation staff at the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) in assessing the long-term preservation potential of data deposited in the repository, and it is available in both English and French.

A modified checklist (v2) was presented at the IASSIST Conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia in May 2024. These changes were made in response to: a review of the checklist's use over a 2 year period at FRDR, from feedback gathered from an appraisal checklist workshop co-hosted by the Alliance and the Data Curation Network on Sept. 9, 2022, and potential use cases from repositories in the US and Ireland.

The authors would greatly appreciate further feedback on version 2 of the checklist and would particularly welcome comments from repositories that modify the checklist to suit their needs.