LIS586DIGITAL PRESERVATIONAuthenticity, Integrity & Trust

The Ship of Theseus

Giotto’s Navicella

Drawing attributed to Parri Spinelli, c. 1412-19

Giotto’s Navicella - Painting

Painting by Francesco Berretta & Guido Abbatini, 1628 & 1649

Giotto’s Navicella Today

The Uffington White Horse

The Cutty Sark

AuthenticPhotography

John Shaw Digital Photograph, Denali

Alfred Stieglitz Photogravure, Venice

Authenticity & Time-Based media

“Conservation enables different possible authentic installations of the work to be realised in the future.”

Atsuko Tanaka“Electric Dress”1956

Atsuko Tanaka“Electric Dress”@ Guggenheim

Authentic What Exactly? Drake’s Plate

Authenticity & Intangible Heritage

Trusted Digital Repositories must…• accept responsibility for long-term maintenance of digital resources on behalf of depositors for benefit

of current & future users; • have an organizational system that supports long-term viability of both the repository and digital

information in its care; • demonstrate fiscal responsibility and sustainability; • design its systems in accordance with accepted conventions and standards to ensure the ongoing

management, access and security of materials in its care; • establish methodologies for system evaluation that meet community expectations of trustworthiness; • be depended upon to carry out its long-term responsibilities to depositors and users openly and

explicitly; • have policies/practices/performance that can be measured & audited; • negotiates for & accepts appropriate information from information producers & rights holders; • obtains sufficient control of the information provided to support long-term preservation; • determines the users that make up its designated community; • ensures that the information preserved is "independently understandable" to the designated

community; • follows documented policies and procedures that insure the information is preserved against all

reasonable contingencies and enables the information to be disseminated as authenticated copies of the original or as traceable to the original;

• makes the preservation information available to the designated community; • and works closely with the designated community to advocate the use of good and (where possible)

standard practice in the creation of digital resources.

What is Trust?

trust, n. (trʌst)

1. a. Confidence in or reliance on some quality or attribute of a person or thing, or the truth of a statement. Const. in (of, on, upon, to, unto). b. take on or upon trust (receive, take up in trust, take up upon trust), to accept or give credit to without investigation or evidence. c. transf. with possessive: That in which one's confidence is put; an object of trust.

Value & Evaluation

One or Five?

“Value’s in what people think. Not in what’s real. Value’s in dreams, boy.”

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman – Fables & Reflections: The Hunt

Forms of Value• Monetary• Cultural• Intellectual• Historic• Symbolic• Artistic• Moral

Duranti & Appraisal• Is ascription of value to a record a legitimate act of

appraisal?• Is selection of a record a legitimate act of appraisal?

Characteristics of an Archive• Impartiality - “Archival documents provide first-hand

evidence because they form an actual part of the corpus, of the facts of the case.”

Characteristics of an Archive• Authenticity - “Archival documents are procedurally authentic for three reasons. They are created credible and reliable by those who need to act through them. They are maintained with proper guarantees for further action and for information. And ‘they are definitely set aside for preservation, tacitly adjudged worthy of being kept’ by their creator or legitimate successor as ‘written memorials of . . . activities in the past.’”

Characteristics of an Archive• Naturalness - “The fact that archival documents are not contrived outside the direct requirements of the conduct of affairs — that is, that they accumulate naturally, progressively, and continuously, like the sediments of geological stratifications — provides them with an element of spontaneous yet structured cohesiveness.”

Characteristics of an Archive• Interrelatedness -- “archival documents are linked among themselves by a relationship that arises at the moment in which they are created, is determined by the reason for which they are created, and is necessary to their very existence, to their ability to accomplish their purpose, to their meaning for the activity in which they participate, and to their capacity of being evidence.”

Duranti and Value

• An archive is a completely integrated and mutually constitutive whole.

• Any assertion of relative value that besmirches a record’s impartiality and authenticity besmirches the whole archive.

• “Therefore the attribution of value uses as the primary basis of judgment an element, content, that is in contrast with the procedural and formal neutrality of the archival whole.”

The Problem of Manuscripts• Duranti defends her notion of impartial selection as still

relevant in the case of manuscript collections.• Notice that she does not mention acquisition of a

complete archive.

Smith• One way of determining your values is determining what

you don’t value. What won’t you pay to preserve.• Decisions on value should be made by users, not

librarians.• In a digital environment of open access to content,

creating another copy doesn’t add much value.