InterPARES: The Search for Authenticity in Electronic Records

The research of the InterPARES project has focused, for a number of years, on textual electronic records created in institutional settings. As a result, its work to date may not have attracted the attention of the archival moving image community. The InterPARES 2 project, currently in its initial stages, is the first to turn its attention to audiovisual documents. This paper attempts to give a brief overview of the earlier work in order to offer an introduction to the research methodologies used and the findings that form the starting point for the current project's research.

InterPARES 2 is actually the third project in a series of archival investigations of digital materials. The first two projects were the Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records (1994 to 1997) and the InterPARES project (1999 to 2001). All three projects are firmly rooted in the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC). This academic starting point has, from the beginning, set the research within a time-tested set of assumptions and definitions from the records management and archival disciplines, developed over several centuries. By enlisting the participation of records creators, archivists, and information technologists, the research continually tests traditional knowledge and requirements against current record-keeping practices, current operational realities in archival institutions, and the ability of the current state of technology to support the needs of these groups.

The Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records

This first project is referred to by a number of names, most commonly the UBC Project, the UBC-MAS Project, or the UBC-DoD Project. Luciana Duranti and Terry Eastwood, who both teach archival studies at UBC, served as principal investigator and coinvestigator, respectively. Heather MacNeil, a doctoral student at UBC at that time, joined the project as a research assistant.

The goal of the first project, to quote MacNeil, was "to identify and define conceptually the nature of an electronic record and the conditions necessary to ensure its reliability and authenticity during its active life, based on the concepts and methods of diplomatics and archival science." ¹ In other words, the project focused on records while still in the hands of the records creator.

Diplomatics provided an important starting point for the researchers, but because it is a field of study little known outside European textual archival studies, it deserves a brief introduction. Diplomatics emerged in the seventeenth century as an analytical technique for determining the authenticity of records issued by sovereign authorities in previous centuries. The tenets and methods of diplomatics were first laid out in 1681 by Jean Mabillon, a Benedictine monk. Mabillon examined, among other things, the language of documents, their characteristic parts, their seals, and the systems of chronology used in dating them. For over four centuries, diplomatics has been used to help determine a record's authenticity for legal purposes and to assess medieval records as historical sources.

In the early 1990s, Duranti began to explore the possibility of adapting essentially paper-based diplomatics to address the growing questions about the reliability and authenticity of electronic records. The results of this study appeared in six articles, originally published in Archivaria, the journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists. They have now been published as a book, Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science. ²

The UBC-MAS Project attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Defense Records Management Task Force (DoDTF), who joined the research in 1995 in search of improved methods for managing the department's traditional records and the growing volume of records being created in electronic form. The DoDTF participants introduced the UBC researchers to IDEF modeling, an Integrated DEFinition language and methodology, which was used to define records management functions in an operational environment and break them down into smaller and more precise units of analysis.

The researchers concluded that to maintain the reliability and authenticity of electronic records, the creator should

• establish agency-wide...