Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 13
Authenticity
authenticity (plural authenticities)
1. The quality of being genuine or not corrupted from the original.
I hereby certify that this is an authentic copy.
2. Truthfulness of origins, attributions, commitments, sincerity, and intentions.
The painting was not authentic after all; it was just a copy.
3. (obsolete) The quality of being authentic (of established authority).
(Wiktionary definition
from
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/authenticity
down-
loaded 14 Aug 2010)
Authenticity is a fundamental issue for the long-term preservation of digital objects:
the relevance of authenticity as a preliminary and central requirement has been
investigated by many international projects. Some focused on long-term preserva-
tion of authentic digital records in the e-government environment, and in scientific
and cultural domains.
Much has been written about Authenticity. However in order to create tools which
can be relied upon and which are practical we must achieve the following:
•
build on the excellent work which has already been carried out
◦
previous work has for the most part focussed on what we have referred to as
Rendered Digital Objects therefore we must ensure that we can deal with the
variety of other types of objects as discussed in
Chap. 4
•
convert these rather abstract ideas into something which is widely applicable but
also practical and implementable
•
show some practical examples, from real archives, using a practical tool.
Therefore this chapter first discusses the previous work on Authenticity, includ-
ing the definitions from OAIS, and introduces a number of basic concepts. From
these concepts we build up a conceptual model. The concept of Significant
