We present ARCHANGEL; a de-centralised platform for ensuring the long-term
integrity of digital documents stored within public archives. Document
integrity is fundamental to public trust in archives. Yet currently that trust
is built upon institutional reputation --- trust at face value in a centralised
authority, like a national government archive or University. ARCHANGEL proposes
a shift to a technological underscoring of that trust, using distributed ledger
technology (DLT) to cryptographically guarantee the provenance, immutability
and so the integrity of archived documents. We describe the ARCHANGEL
architecture, and report on a prototype of that architecture build over the
Ethereum infrastructure. We report early evaluation and feedback of ARCHANGEL
from stakeholders in the research data archives space.Comment: Submitted to ACM Document Engineering 201
