TDR Docs

APTrust's self-assessment against ISO 16363, the standard for audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories.

The content is built with MkDocs using the Material theme, the same setup used by the other APTrust documentation repos.

If you are here to edit the content, start with CONTRIBUTING.md. It covers getting access, editing in the browser or in VS Code, and the accessibility rules this content is held to. It assumes no prior experience with git or GitHub. The rest of this file is a technical overview of how the repository is put together.

Editing locally

You'll need Python 3.x and pip. To set it all up, run:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then start the server with:

mkdocs serve

If you get a message saying mkdocs is not installed, try running the server with this command instead:

python3 -m mkdocs serve

To check that everything still builds and that no internal links are broken:

mkdocs build --strict

How the content is organized

Markdown lives under docs/, one folder per section of the standard:

Folder	Contents
docs/oais/	OAIS conformance documents
docs/tdr-3/	TDR 3.0 Organizational Infrastructure
docs/tdr-4/	TDR 4.0 Digital Object Management
docs/tdr-5/	TDR 5.0 Infrastructure and Security Risk Management
docs/img/	Images

Filenames use a zero-padded hierarchical sequence (04.02.04.01.01-…) so that alphabetical order matches ISO 16363 criterion order.

Every page carries front matter recording its title, the ISO criterion number, the sequence used for ordering, its section, and the source_url and retrieved date it was drawn from. Every page also carries a description, which becomes the page's <meta name="description"> tag — use the folded-with-strip form when adding a page:

---
description: >-
  One or two wrapped lines, 50-160 characters total.
---

The navigation sidebar is defined explicitly in mkdocs.yml. Page titles are often long ISO criterion statements, so nav: carries a shortened label for each page while the full title stays as the page's heading. Adding a page means adding it to nav:.

Accessibility

Content here is written to meet WCAG 2.2 level AA: images carry descriptive alt text, heading levels are sequential, tables have real header rows, and link text describes its destination rather than saying "here" or repeating a bare URL. Please keep to that when editing.

Reviewing content in Word

scripts/docs_to_docx.py converts the pages into Word documents for a collaborative review round in Google Drive. See scripts/README.md.

Publishing

This repo is not published yet. It is intended to be folded into the unified APTrust documentation site at docs.aptrust.org alongside the User Guide, DART, Registry and Preservation Services docs, which are combined by the aptrust-docs repo using mkdocs-monorepo-plugin.

Do not run mkdocs gh-deploy. Publishing is the parent repo's job; deploying from here would put a broken standalone copy of the site on a gh-pages branch.

Registering with aptrust-docs

Until the steps below are done, a commit to main here publishes nothing. aptrust-docs rebuilds on a push to itself, on a nightly 07:00 UTC schedule, or on a repository_dispatch event of type sub-repo-updated — which only its four registered sub-repos send. Adding this repo as a fifth:

1. Add .github/workflows/notify-parent-docs.yml here, modeled on the copy in APTrust/registry-docs: peter-evans/repository-dispatch@v3, event type sub-repo-updated, targeting APTrust/aptrust-docs. Note this repo's default branch is main, where the sibling repos use master.
2. Add a DOCS_DISPATCH_TOKEN secret to this repo — a token with permission to trigger workflows in aptrust-docs. The sub-repo workflow cannot fire the event without it.
3. In aptrust-docs, add tdr-docs to the checkout and merge steps of .github/workflows/build-and-deploy.yml.
4. In the parent mkdocs.yml, add this repo to the nav: via mkdocs-monorepo-plugin. site_name: TDR Docs makes the URL prefix /tdr-docs/, so changing it moves every page.

Once that is in place, a commit to main is live in three to five minutes, and the status block in CONTRIBUTING.md should be deleted.

License

Copyright © 2026 APTrust. The content in this repository is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), matching the combined site at docs.aptrust.org. The full legal text is in LICENSE.