How recordkeeping ensures trust in digital archives

Imagine a researcher in 2067 examining objects in a digital archive that were deposited in the early 21st century. How can the researcher be assured that those digital materials – whether born-digital or digital surrogates of analog materials – have not been accidentally or maliciously altered sometime during the intervening decades? Ten archival workers – archivists, metadata specialists, digitization managers and preservation technologists – were interviewed about how contemporary recordkeeping practices ensure the authenticity of born-digital files and digital surrogates for future users of the archive. This poster presents preliminary results about how archives are adapting to emergent needs for processing digital materials at scale, ensuring that workflows capture entities, activities and agents (provenance information), and ensuring that current systems support migration of provenance information to successor systems. Copyright © 2017 by Association for Information Science and Technology