Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 5.1
(continued)
Outline threat
Examples
The chain of evidence may be lost and there
may be lack of certainty of provenance or
authenticity
Someone may claim that a digital object is
something of significance, for example a
diary of a famous person or a piece of
missing scientific data, but one may have
doubts about its origin and whether it has
been surreptitiously altered
Access and use restrictions may make it
difficult to reuse data, or alternatively
may not be respected in future
A piece of software may refuse to work
after a certain date because of a time
limit on the licence; it may not be
possible to back up a digital object
because it would not be legal; your own
data, which you had submitted to a
repository, may be used without your
permission even though you explicitly
stated that it should be kept for 30 years
without anyone else accessing it
Loss of ability to identify the location
of data
An XML schema may reference other
schema, but the location suggested for
that other schema cannot be found
A Web page contains a link to an image
but the URL does not work - in fact the
DNS may say there is no such address
registered
The current custodian of the data, whether
an organisation or project, may cease to
exist at some point in the future
The organisation that is charged with
looking after the digital object may lose
its funding
The ones we trust to look after the digital
holdings may let us down
The people we entrust with our digital
objects may make preservation decisions
which in the long run mean that the
digital objects are not usable
5.3 Summary
In order to preserve digitally encoded information we must have some understand-
ing of the types of threats that must be guarded against. This chapter should have
provided the reader with requisite background knowledge to be aware of the wide
variety of threats which must be countered.
 
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