Archiving in the networked world: authenticity and integrity

This article aims to discuss how concepts from the analog world apply to a purely digital environment, and look in particular at how authenticity needs to be viewed in the digital world in order to make some form of validation possible.

The article describes authenticity and integrity in the analog world and looks at how to measure it in a digital environment.

Authenticity in the digital world generally means, in a purely technical sense, that a document's integrity has been checked using mathematical algorithms against other copies on independently managed servers, and that provenance records show that the document has a clearly established succession from a clearly defined original. Readers should recognize that this is different than how one defines authenticity and integrity in the analog world.

Most of the key issues surrounding digital authenticity have not yet been tested, but they will be when the economic value of an authentic digital work reaches the courts.