Managing Security and Access

Confidentiality of Resources

Marking a Resource as Confidential

When you mark a file as containing confidential information, the file itself will never be accessible to the public. The file's metadata remains visible, but the file itself is not visible and cannot be downloaded (unless you give access rights to a specific tDAR user).

To mark a file as confidential, select "Confidential" from the drop down menu with the sub-heading "This item has access restrictions".

Why would I mark a resource as "Confidential"? You may choose to mark a resource as confidential if you feel that it contains sensitive data that could endanger an archaeological resource, information that affiliated communities or other interested communities might not wish to be widely available, or information that you are not prepared to share. For example, you may choose to mark a file that contains mortuary features as confidential to respect the wishes of affiliated communities to restrict access to this information. This data should likely remain restricted to professional bioarchaeologists and others who will treat the information with proper respect. 

Redacting Confidential Data

tDAR automatically generalizes specific locations set using the website’s “Select Region” tool, but uploaders should be careful to review their resources to ensure that site locations and other sensitive information are redacted from all text, images or other fields where they might appear.

• For more information on redacting information, see Redaction.

Setting Access Permissions

Files can be marked as confidential, restricting access to only users the uploader specifies but allowing all users to see the associated metadata.

Embargoing Resources

Resources can be uploaded to tDAR with an embargo that keeps the resource private until a specified future date. Users can allows other specified users access to embargoed files before the embargo ends (i.e. such as when multiple researchers want to use tDAR to collaborate on a data set without releasing it publicly just yet).

When you mark a file as embargoed, you are restricting access to the file for 5 years. In other words, the file will not be accessible to the public for the next 5 years. The file's metadata will be visible during that period, but the file itself is not visible and cannot be downloaded. After the embargo period has ended, the file will become accessible to the public. 

To mark a file as embargoed, select "Embargoed" from the drop down menu with the sub-heading "This item has access restrictions".

Why would I mark a resource as "Embargoed"? You may choose to mark a file as embargoed to restrict access to the resource for a limited period of time. For example, you may wish to register a file with tDAR that houses data for an ongoing research project. You would like to store the data and share it with a select group of colleagues working with you on the research project. However, this data must remain restricted until the project is complete and results are published in some fashion. You can mark this resource as embargoed to indicate that it is restricted for a period of time before it can be made available to the public.