Corinne Rogers

Diplomatics of born digital documents – considering documentary form in a digital environment

Purpose – This paper aims to explore a new model of “record” that maps traditional attributes of a record onto a technical decomposition of digital records. It compares the core characteristics necessary to call a digital object a “record” in terms of diplomatics or “evidence” in terms of digital forensics. It then isolates three layers of abstraction: the conceptual, the logical and the physical. By identifying the essential elements of a record at each layer of abstraction, a diplomatics of digital records can be proposed. Design/methodology/approach – Digital diplomatics, a research outcome of the International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) project, gives archivists a methodology for analyzing the identity and integrity of digital records in electronic systems and thereby assessing their authenticity (Duranti and Preston, 2008; Duranti, 2005) and tracing their provenance. Findings – Digital records consist of user-generated data (content), system-generated m...

Record Authenticity as a Measure of Trust: A View Across Records Professions, Sectors, and Legal Systems

The ability to assess and protect the authenticity of records is axiomatic to archival science, and enjoys a centuries’ long theoretical foundation. This paper presents a summary of the author’s research into contemporary ideas about authenticity of digital records among records professionals. It found that the issue of authenticity is as much social as technical, with records professionals using social indicators over technical ones in managing authenticity, but relying on technical means to authenticate records. It presents the role of legal system as an independent variable in considerations of authenticity, opening up a line of inquiry for further study.

Authenticity as a Social Contract—We are Our Records

This poster presents the authors’ work to date on developing an application profile for authenticity metadata (the IPAM, or InterPARES Authenticity Metadata), including (1) the functional requirements, (2) metadata elements derived from the Chain of Preservation model from the InterPARES research project, (3) a crosswalk of a sample of IPAM elements to Dublin Core, PREMIS, and MoReq2010, (4) those elements deemed essential to presume the authenticity of a record as it moves from creation to permanent preservation, and (5) next steps, integrating the application profile into the Archivematica preservation system the core elements of the application profile relating to maintaining the presumption of authenticity through preservation and access.