L’Hours, Kleemola and Recker make care itself describable. Their model differentiates deposit compliance, initial curation and active preservation, then asks what metadata must exist for a repository to state transparently what level of care a digital object receives. The conceptual innovation is to treat preservation not as a binary condition but as a graded, time-bound and accountable relation between object and institution. Retention periods, reappraisal triggers, technical monitoring, semantic artefacts, formats, ontologies and designated communities become parts of the preservation record rather than invisible administrative background. Methodologically, the paper translates institutional responsibility into machine-actionable metadata and explicit lifecycle states. Its theoretical significance extends beyond repository certification: an object’s future depends not only on what it contains but on the documented conditions under which somebody has undertaken to keep it understandable and reusable. The work bridges data stewardship, infrastructure studies and archival theory by rendering care as an informational property of the object–repository relation.