Levels of Curation, Appraisal, Digital Preservation and Reuse in Successful CoreTrustSeal Applications 2017-2023

CoreTrustSeal (https://www.coretrustseal.org) is an international non-profit organization offering a certification procedure for trustworthy digital repositories since 2017. To obtain certification, repositories complete an application via an online tool in which they provide background information about the repository as well as responses to the 16 CoreTrustSeal Requirements.
The successful applications are published in PDF documents whose structure and layout changed over time as the tool used to create them evolved. While the PDF format ensures that the published information remains fixed and stable, it also means that processing and analyzing the candidates’ responses other than intellectually is very difficult as they are largely unstructured text locked in PDFs. Therefore, tracking developments in the responses over time and across Requirements versions is difficult.
To address this issue, continuing and expanding previous work by Lindlar and Rudnik, this dataset codes information from the responses that all successful CoreTrustSeal applicants between 2017-2023 provided to the requirements dealing with Appraisal, Preservation Plan, and Data Reuse. In addition, provided background information (Repository type and Level of Curation) were coded.
Finally, all URLs provided in the responses to the mentioned requirements were checked using a Python script to determine the extent of evidence no longer accessible due to link rot.