Maria Guercio

Managing Authenticity through the Digital Resource Lifecycle

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.

A Digital Infrastructure for Trustworthiness - The Sapienza Digital Library Experience

The building process of Sapienza Digital Library’s (SDL) digital resources was designed for collecting the information required by the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Preservation Description Information(PDI): Provenance, Reference, Fixity, Context, and Access Rights Information. The Submission Information Packages’(SIP) preservation metadata was encoded in the semantics of the PREMIS standard which is the implementation metadata set, mapped from the OAIS conceptual model. The conformant implementation of the PREMIS standard was one of the principles which permeates the SIP building process. All relevant legal aspects and formal agreements, referred to the organizations involved in the different OAIS functions of the SDL digital repository, were analyzed and structured for their inclusion into the forthcoming AIP management, and for unleashing of the preservation strategies, and for supporting the authenticity of resources.

La classificazione nell'organizzazione dei sistemi documentari digitali: criticità e nuove prospettive

The article presents a reflection on the Archival Classification with specific reference to the role that this function plays in Digital Documentary Systems. Those aspects have been dealt with in depth both on the methodological and theoretical level and directly on the ground since mid-Nineties of the last century; however, many relevant issues are still unanswered, despite the development of specific software and standards. This paper analyses the recent Italian and International literature, and highlights the delays of the current disciplinary research and of the practical experiences of the last years, that in many cases show an impasse or even a recession phase.

Conservare il digitale: modello nazionale e contesto internazionale

Il contributo analizza il tema della conservazione digitale con specifico riferimento al contesto archivistico e al quadro normativo nazionale. Senza entrare nel merito della ricca letteratura di settore, si sottolineano le contraddizioni che caratterizzano lo stato attuale del modello italiano, in particolare la mancanza di chiarezza del termine stesso di conservazione utilizzato nella normativa e la limitata attenzione per gli assetti della tutela e per il ruolo delle istituzioni archivistiche. Una griglia di riferimento dei principali requisiti organizzativi viene discussa confrontando le soluzioni adottate in Italia rispetto ad altri paesi europei e al contesto nordamericano. The article analyses the digital preservation with specific reference to the archival context and to the Italian legislative framework. The rich literature on the sector cannot be deeply investigated in this article, but some contradictions of the Italian model are here considered with specific reference to the lack of consistency of the concept of digital preservation in the legislation and the limited attention paid by the legislation to the role of the archival institutions. A final template lists and compares the main requirements for a correct preservation system to the models applied in Europe, North America and Italy. DOI 10.4399/97888548960932

Preserving Authenticity Evidence to Assess Provenance and Integrity of Digital Resources

During their lifecycle, digital resources, notably digital representation of artistic work, may often go through changes of custody, format migrations and other changes of their representation. This may pose a threat to the integrity of their intellectual content and makes it difficult to trace their provenance. The paper addresses the crucial problem of gathering and preserving the evidence that would allow, at a later time, to properly assess the authenticity, the provenance and the integrity of these resources. The solution that we propose is based on the definition of special XML structures to preserve the authenticity evidence, which are compliant with PREMIS Data Dictionary, a widely acknowledged standard in the digital preservation community, and hence guarantees a sound basis for the interoperability among different repositories.