Introduction to OAIS Concepts and Terminology - Advanced Digital Preservation - page 22

3.2.2.2 Provenance Information
Provenance Information: The information that documents the history of the
Content Information. This information tells the origin or source of the Content
Information, any changes that may have taken place since it was originated, and
who has had custody of it since it was originated. The archive is responsible
for creating and preserving Provenance Information from the point of Ingest;
however, earlier Provenance Information should be provided by the Producer.
Provenance Information adds to the evidence to support Authenticity.
Provenance may reasonably be divided into what we might term Technical
Provenance - things that, for example, are recorded fairly automatically by soft-
ware. This must be supplemented by Non-technical Provenance, by which we mean,
for example, the information about the people who are in charge of the Content
Information - the people who could perhaps fake the other PDI. In other words in
order to judge whether we can trust the multitude of information that surrounds the
Content Information, we must be able to judge whether we trust the people who
were responsible for collecting it, and who may perhaps have been able to fake it.
This will be discussed in more detail in Sect. 13 .
3.2.2.3 Context Information
Content Information: The information that documents the relationships of
the Content Information to its environment. This includes why the Content
Information was created and how it relates to other Content Information objects.
It is worth noting here that many traditional archivists would say that
“context” is all important and trumps all other considerations [ 16 ].
OAIS defines “context” in a rather more limited way, but on the other
hands provides a greater level of granularity with which to work,
although does point out that Provenance, for example, is a type of
Context.
3.2.2.4 Fixity Information
Fixity Information: The information which documents the mechanisms that
ensure that the Content Information object has not been altered in an undoc-
umented manner. An example is a Cyclical Redundancy Check (CRC) code for
afile.
Digests [ 15 ] are often used for this purpose, relying on the fact that a short bit
sequence can be created, using one of several algorithms, from a larger binary object
which it represents, essentially uniquely. By this we mean that it is, practically