The common characteristic of digital repositories is that they exist to preserve electronic data and content. But existing repositories of scholarly source materials vary widely in the kinds of content they preserve, the activities they perform, and the funding, governance, and organizational models they adopt. Robin Dale, project director of the Auditing and Certification of Digital Archives project, has developed detailed profiles of two major but quite different digital repositories: the repository of datasets and collections maintained by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and the e-Depot, an electronic journals archive developed and maintained by Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands. These profiles can be downloaded from the project Web site at:

• Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and
• Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands (E-Depot).

The profiles provide information about the organizational structures, systems architecture, funding systems, and user communities of those repositories, as well as about agreements between repositories and the publishers or producers that deposit data and electronic content. The profile information is based on pre-audit analysis of the repositories and on documents and information disclosed by the parent organizations. It provides a starting point for further CRL analysis and auditing to determine the relative reliability of the various repository solutions that are now emerging.

An additional profile for the emerging repository Portico, is also available online.