Borealis CTS Certification Documentation Suite, 2024-2025

Introduction

Since the CTS Certification and Cohort Project ended in 2022, the Borealis community and service team had been gathering feedback about CTS and research data preservation in Borealis. Results from a 2023 Borealis Institutional Administrators Survey further indicated that institutional preservation policies for research data are still underdeveloped, and that additional support may be required for institutions to achieve CTS based on the new requirements.

Further, there had been additional requests for expanded preservation services including more active management preservation options built into Borealis, as well as updates to the CTS Project documents to support institutional preservation policy development. In order to support ongoing preservation activities at institutions to meet the requirements of CTS, additional work is needed to advance preservation goals.

With the release of the CTS 2023-2025 requirements and interest in more support for preservation from the Borealis community, Borealis and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada's Preservation Expert Group undertook a documentation project to update policy and application templates developed during the 2020-2022 project. A refresh and expansion of Borealis documentation related to preservation, including clarifications around roles and responsibilities, was also completed.

The project involved:

• Compare 2020-2022 and 2023-2025 requirements to understand changes
• Review successful applications based on current requirements to learn about various approaches to preservation
• Revise template documents developed during the cohort project based on changes identified and feedback received by cohort participants
• Develop new guidance to address any gaps
• Revise Borealis Preservation Plan and related documentation

The below documents are available in English and French and in PDF and Microsoft Word formats and are licensed for sharing under a CC-BY license. We invite the community to provide feedback on the templates by contacting the Borealis team.

These templates were originally published in 2022 as part of the CTS Certification and Cohort Project. The below templates were updated by the Alliance’s Preservation Expert Group and Borealis intern Ada Lu to reflect the 2023-2025 CTS requirements. These templates were finalized in June 2025 and translated by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, Borealis Graduate Student Library Assistant Malik Rugege, Expert Group members Émilie Fortin and Amanda Tomé, and with the support of DeepL. The Preservation Expert Group are: Corey Davis, Émilie Fortin, Meghan Goodchild, Steve Marks, James MacGregor, Y.G. Rancourt, Alisa Rod, Mary Catherine Shea, Julie Shi, Robyn Stobbs, and Amanda Tomé.

Policy Templates

These policy templates are intended to support Borealis member institutions with developing a comprehensive policy framework for managing their institutional collections. The templates address selection, deposit, curation, deaccession and retention, and preservation, and are designed to complement Borealis policies, such as the Terms of Use, that apply to all collections within Borealis. The templates are scoped to the Borealis service, but the content is openly available for use by any interested institution.