title: Certification and Quality: A French Experience
creators: Marion Massol Lorène Béchard Olivier Rouchon
abstract: The CINES has two main missions, among which is the long-term preservation of French scientific data. To provide this service, CINES deployed in 2006 one of the first digital repository in France named PAC (Plateforme d’Archivage du CINES – the CINES preservation system).
  In order to secure this mandate in the long-term, it is absolutely crucial for CINES to prove the quality of the services it provides to the French higher education and research community. For this purpose, the CINES strategy relies on the adoption of a quality assurance approach which includes the certification of its repository.
  Over the past four years, the PAC staff ran not less than five audits, internal as much as external. Various systems of reference have been used: some were at the national level (National Archives accreditation), others were at a European level (Data Seal of Approval accreditation, DRAMBORA) or even at an international level (ISO 16 363, TRAC).
  From these audits, the strengths and weaknesses of the digital preservation repository have been highlighted. Action plans have been put together and executed to improve the service quality. The aim of transparency, which ranked first in the certification initiative, also reinforced the trust of the user community toward the long term digital preservation service of the CINES. Based on such an experience, the PAC staff is now willing to share its knowledge and feedback with the rest of the community, by participating in think tanks as well as standardization workgroups.
keywords: singapore certification audit quality trust long-term preservation archive risk management metrics and assessment