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the curator presumably would have satisfied himself or herself that the object as
transformed had not lost required information content and therefore was still being
adequately preserved. Therefore the curator would see the new object has continuing
to maintain authenticity.
This may have been done by, for example, checking that the words agreed
between the Word file and the PDF file; that the rendering of the pages was rea-
sonably consistent between the two versions; that text which had been emphasised
in the Word version by highlighting or by changing colour, was also a emphasized
in some appropriate way in the PDF version.
It will be recognised that for the Word to PDF conversion the curator checked and
documented various properties that are often called out as Significant Properties.
Thus we argue that the function of Significant Properties, consistent with Wilson
in [
156
], is the identification of “
those characteristics [technical, intellectual, and
aesthetic] agreed by the archive or by the collection manager to be the most
important features to preserve over time
”.
Wilson presents a related argument in [
164
]. Also Rothenberg and Bikson [
163
]
suggest, with respect to authenticity criteria:
“the intent of these criteria is to ensure
that preserved records retain their original behavior, appearance, content, struc-
ture, and context, for all relevant intents and purposes”
which echoes Significant
Properties.
However the important point to note is that their real importance is that
Significant Properties provide some of the evidence about the Authenticity of
the digital objects after Transformation (a point emphasized by Wilson), and are
selected by the curator, who may or may not take the Designated Community into
account, and moreover different curators may make different choices. Wilson con-
siders the notion of Performance as a test of the authenticity of preservation with
respect to significant properties. This is an important feature, which as we shall see,
can be transferred into a science data context.
13.6.3 Significant Properties and Data
Scientific data has yet to be dealt with in studies of Significant Properties. However
some clarification may be gained by considering another Transformation, this time
of a FITS file converted to a CDF file. Again the bit sequences will have been
changed extensively. In such a case it could be asked how a curator could have
satisfied himself or herself that the object as transformed had not lost required infor-
mation content and therefore was still being adequately preserved. If (s)he could
do this then the curator would see the new object as having continued to maintain
authenticity.
The FITS file might contain an image; the CDF file should therefore contain a
similar image. However just comparing the two images rendered on screens would
be inadequate for scientific purposes. Instead the curator would need to be satis-
fied, for example, that the data values of the pixel elements were identical in the
