Authenticity in a Digital Environment (review)

Authenticity in a Digital Environment, ed. Abby Smith. Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2000. 76 p. $20. (ISBN 1-887334-77-7) Also available (text and PDF) at <http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/reports. html>

In the familiar world of analog information recorded in manuscripts, documents, printed books, and the like--all of them real objects we can hold in our hands and read with our eyes--determining authenticity is usually a straightforward business. Over the last couple of thousand years, human culture has developed reliable means for answering the question, "Is this thing what it purports to be?" Through various forms of external and internal analysis, we are able to distinguish the genuine from the forgery, the original from the copies, the reliable from the suspicious. The digital world is more complicated. Not only is there the problem of dependency on particular hardware and software, designedly obsolete before we know it, but also the usual tests cannot be applied and wouldn't mean much if they could. With digital documents, there is no physical reality to be examined; there may not even be a single original against which copies can be assessed. How then can we determine whether to put our individual and collective faith in these digital carriers and the information they contain? In January 2000, the Council on Library and Information Resources assembled a small conference to explore these questions and to begin laying the groundwork for understanding the concept of authenticity in the digital world.

Five scholars from different disciplines prepared the papers published here, and a similarly interdisciplinary group discussed and debated them. Charles Cullen, president of the Newberry Library and formerly editor of the John Marshall Papers and Thomas Jefferson Papers, describes the techniques documentary editors use to determine whether historical manuscripts are authentic and worthy of inclusion in such projects, and he speculates briefly on how this might apply to the digital environment. Peter Hirtle, director of Cornell Library's Institute for Digital Collections, reviews the principles archivists have used to ensure the authenticity of the evidence in their holdings, and he describes two recent studies (one at the University of Pittsburgh, one at the University of British Columbia) that have tried to specify the essential components of digital "recordness." David Levy, an independent consultant formerly with the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, provides a thought-provoking tour of a world in which there are no originals but only copies, and the instability of digital documents is the only safe presumption. Clifford Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, zeroes in on trust as the essential dilemma, suggesting several possible strategies for resolving it. Jeff Rothenberg of the RAND Corporation, perhaps the foremost thinker on the problems of preservation of digital information, connects the question of authenticity to that of the long-term usability of such information.

These short essays have the unevenness inherent in all collections, but the participants succeed in their goal of laying out the intellectual groundwork and defining those aspects of the issue that need further discussion and research. All of these authors are at least implicitly asking the critical question for information professionals: do the traditional theories and methods, developed for a world of hard copies, apply to the digital world, or are entirely new theoretical foundations needed? To resort to the cliché that the authors avoid: do we need a new paradigm or will the old one do? No easy answers are offered, but several of the ideas explored here may prove useful. Hirtle and others stress the importance of context and provenance, the archivist's familiar tools, and these are probably even more significant for assessing digital information: if we know where a particular stream of bits came from and where it has been, we will be in a better position to judge its validity. Lynch's typology or hierarchy of digital documents, proceeding upward from mere data...