Managing Authenticity through the Digital Resource Lifecycle

Abstract

On the basis of principles and methodologies developed by the major projects on digital preservation, the paper addresses the fundamental problem of authenticity management, and specifically of defining appropriate mechanisms and tools to transform the presumption of authenticity into the capacity of its verification. The approach we propose is to concentrate on the digital resource lifecycle, since, in order to make a proper assessment, one must be able to trace back all the transformations the digital resource has undergone since its creation, and that may have affected its authenticity. For these transformations one needs to collect and preserve the appropriate evidence that would allow, at a later time, to make the assessment. We have therefore developed a model of the digital resource lifecycle in order to identify the main events that impact on authenticity and to define precise operational guidelines to specify which evidence should be collected and how to organize it. A case study analysis is currently being performed to check the validity of the model and to see how it specializes on several specific environments. Preliminary results are already available and confirm that the model is sound and that the implementation of the guidelines can be worked out effectively and with a fairly reasonable amount of effort.

Work partially supported by European Community under the Information Society Technologies (IST) program of the 7th FP for RTD - project APARSEN, ref. 269977.