Digitary

Contacts

Jonathan Dempsey, Chief Executive - jonathan.dempsey@digitary.net

Andy Dowling, CTO - andy.dowling@digitary.net

About our Market Presence

We have 20 customer institutions in Ireland that account for almost 70% of publicly funded students. Our customers in Ireland are Dublin City University, Dublin Institute of Technology, Mary Immaculate College, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, University College Dublin, University of Limerick and a national implementation for 14 Irish Institutes of Technology, which hosted by HP at its data centre in West Dublin.   

Our initial five university customers in the UK are London School of Economics, University of Bradford, University of Cambridge, University of Kent and University of Manchester.  Digitary is the only solution consistent with the JISC CETIS ([&nbsp]specification for the UK's new Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) that is envisaged to be delivered to all students beginning in 2010/11.  
The company's first customer outside Ireland and the UK is the recently added University of Porto, the largest university by student numbers and one of the highest ranking in Portugal.  Our first customer outside of Europe is Australian National University where they will use Digitary for the delivery and authentication of the Australian Higher Education Graduation Statement, which is the Australian version of the Diploma Supplement.

The company provides expertise to the European Committee for Standardisation's European Learner Mobility project (CEN/TC 353 -www.cen.eu) and the Digitary approach has informed the means of delivery and authentication of the electronic version of the European Diploma Supplement.

About the Digitary System

Digitary is a proprietary system for the secure online access to official graduation documents. (Digitary is also the name of the Irish company that developed the system). The Digitary model has been under continuous development since 2001 and takes into account feedback from stakeholders in the European Higher Education area (including Higher Education Institutions and various national bodies and agencies).

In terms of classification, the Digitary model is based on one-way authentication of the authoritative document source (HEI) by the recipient (recruiter) (authentication can be mutual if the recipient registers with the system). At the request of the graduate, bearer credentials can be issued and delivered to the recipient either directly from the HEI (signed S/MIME) or via the graduate.

Digitary supports the digital signing of graduation documents using advanced electronic signatures, qualified certificates and secure signature creation devices compliant with relevant EU legislation and ETSI technical standards, thus creating an electronic master record document at the HEI that has the same legal status as a hand signed paper document. HEIs may either batch sign these documents or may sign them on demand. The Digitary system installed at a HEI transparently maintains all documents issued, including their digital signatures and associated status attributes, for the long term.

The Digitary system provides a set of online services to graduates and document recipients that enables controlled access, monitoring, and verification of documents online. Graduates must authenticate to the system first, and can then share their document(s) with one or more recipient(s) by creating "Document Shares". A "Document Share" is a randomly-generated URL hosted at the HEI's system that points to a page showing the verified document and its status. The graduate can set the level of access control associated with the URL, how long the document is available for at that URL and how the URL is delivered to the recipient (S/MIME from the HEI's Digitary system, or manually) and can subsequently edit these attributes. Three levels of access control can be associated with the shared URL:

a)  open access: anybody with the shared URL can access the document (weakest)

b)  any registered recipient: anybody who possesses the shared URL and who has self-registered their details with the HEI (proving possession of their own email address) can access the document

c)  specific registered recipient: anybody who possesses the shared URL and who has self-registered their details with the HEI (proving possession of the email address specified by the graduate) can access the document (strongest)

The Digitary system maintains a comprehensive audit trail that records all access to a graduate's own document(s). These details are available to the graduate, the HEI and the recipient (only if the recipient has registered).

For more information see www.digitary.net or contact Jonathan Dempsey on jonathan.dempsey@digitary.net or on +353 87 8515508.

Digitary, Invent Building, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland.