Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Three key concepts are embedded in the above definition namely:
Authenticity:
The degree to which a person (or system) may regard an object as
what it is purported to be. The degree of Authenticity is judged on the basis of
evidence.
There will be much more to say about authenticity in
Chap. 13
, where the whole
chapter is devoted to it.
Independently Understandable:
A characteristic of information that is suf-
ficiently complete to allow it to be interpreted, understood and used by the
Designated Community without having to resort to special resources not widely
available, including named individuals
.
By being able to “understand” a piece of information is meant that
one can do something useful with it; it is not intended to mean that
one understands all of its ramifications.
For example in a criminal investigation of a murder one may have
a database with digitally encoded times of telephone calls; here we
would be satisfied if we could say “the telephone call was made at
12:05 pm on 1st January 2009, UK time”, but to then understand that
this implied that the person who made the call was the murderer is
beyond what OAIS means by being able to “understand” the data.
Now we approach one element of what that the “preservation” part of “digital
preservation” means. To require that things are able to be “interpreted, understood
and used” is to make some very powerful demands. It not only includes playing a
digital recording so it can be heard, or rendering an image or a document so that
it can be seen; it also includes being able to understand what the columns in the
spreadsheet we mention earlier means, or what the numbers in a piece of scientific
data mean; this is needed in order to actually understand and in particular
use
the
data, for example using it in some analysis programme, combining it with other data
in order to derive new scientific insights. The “Independently” part is to exclude the
easy but unreliable option of being able to simply ask the person who created the
digital object; unreliable not because the creator may be a liar but rather because the
creator may be, and in the very long term certainly will be, deceased!
Finally, we have the other key concept of “Designated Community”.
Designated Community:
An identified group of potential Consumers who should
be able to understand a particular set of information. The Designated Community
may be composed of multiple user communities. A Designated Community is
defined by the archive and this definition may change over time.
Why is this a key concept? To answer that question we need to ask another
fundamental question, namely “How can we tell whether a digital object has been
successfully preserved?” - a question which can be asked repeatedly as time passes.
