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Welcome to APTrust

The Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) is a distributed digital preservation repository committed to preserving the digital heritage of its depositors. APTrust services are open to sustaining members (who pay an annual fee directly to us) and to sub-accounts created by sustaining members.

Before You Get Started

Assuming you are already either a sustaining member, or have been added as a sub-account by a sustaining member, the process for getting started looks like this:

You send the following information to help@aptrust.org:

  • The name, email address, and phone number of a person at your organization who will act as your APTrust administrator. We prefer that you send a mobile number so you can use two-factor authentication.

  • Your institution's domain name. (For example, virginia.edu.)

We'll reply to your email with the following:

  • Information on how to log in to your Registry account. Registry is our online registry, showing what you have deposited with APTrust and exposing the features you'll need to restore, delete, query, and audit your materials.

  • A set of AWS credentials that you'll use to upload matierials to our system.

First Steps

Once your local administrator has access to Registry, they can add new users and/or adminstrators for your institution. Registry users have access to all features except:

  • Adding and deactivating user accounts.
  • Approving requests to delete materials from the repository.

Registry administrators can do both of the above.

If you're new to APTrust, you will likely start out by using our demo system to fine-tune your ingest workflows. Once you are able to push materials successfully into the demo repository, you can begin using the production system.

See also the Quick Start training video.