A modular infrastructure for the management of authenticity and persistent identifiers in long-term digital preservation repositories

Observation and experimental data have become a crucial asset for most scientific communities, which are bound to conveniently preserve them to allow reliable assessments on their provenance and integrity, based on suitable and well-documented evidence. On the other hand, these data often go through quite complex lifecycles that include both changes of custody and transformations of their representation. Managing authenticity has, therefore, become a central issue in long-term digital preservation (LTDP). In this paper, we present a model for the management of authenticity evidence, developed within two EU-funded projects, namely APARSEN and SCDIP-ES, that has led to the implementation of a modular framework, which may be exploited both in implementing new repositories and in improving existing ones. The infrastructure we propose is based on an open-source technology and specifically meant to guarantee a large degree of scalability and full interoperability among repositories that are based on it.