Preserving authenticity evidence to assess provenance and integrity of digital resources

During their lifecycle, digital resources, notably digital representation of artistic work, may often go through changes of custody, format migrations and other changes of their representation. This may pose a threat to the integrity of their intellectual content and makes it difficult to trace their provenance. The paper addresses the crucial problem of gathering and preserving the evidence that would allow, at a later time, to properly assess the authenticity, the provenance and the integrity of these resources. The solution that we propose is based on the definition of special XML structures to preserve the authenticity evidence, which are compliant with PREMIS Data Dictionary, a widely acknowledged standard in the digital preservation community, and hence guarantees a sound basis for the interoperability among different repositories. © 2013 Springer-Verlag