The National Geospatial Digital Archive, funded by the Library of Congress, is a partnership between the University of California, Santa Barbara and Stanford University with the purpose of providing long-term preservation of and access to geospatial data and imagery. Geospatial content in the public domain as well as that which is not is being accessioned into our collections. While public domain data may often be accessioned without having to seek explicit permission from the agency or group creating and/or hosting the materials, private data should be captured with a clear understanding of the rights and responsibilities of the stakeholders, be they the content owner or the university. In addition, the two collecting nodes (and any future nodes) must agree upon standards of conduct in order to trust that any content brought into the network will be managed well now and into the future.Joint agreements have been written by UCSB and Stanford that codify all of these relationships. This paper will lay out those agreements, which include the Content Provider Agreement, the NGDA Content Collection Node Agreement, and the NGDA Content Collection Node Procedure Manual. These three agreements provide the legal and structural framework of the NGDA allowing the stewardship network to grow over time with the understanding that each new partner will meet the standards necessary to provide secure long-term preservation of the content.