Analysis of functional requirements to ensure authenticity and integrity of archiving Norwegian electronic public administration records

Abstract

Authenticity and integrity are crucial elements of trust in physical or electronic document archiving. This thesis analyzed the functional requirements of authenticity and integrity and how to ensure them in the context of the Norwegian public administration records. NOARK is the Norwegian recordkeeping and archiving standard and Fedora Commons an open source archival repository software are used as a record management system and archival system respectively to establish the case of the study. For the purpose of meeting the objectives of the study, standards, literatures and previous studies on the area of trusted recordkeeping and archiving are analyzed; on the basis of which an archival framework addressing authenticity, integrity and trusted chain custody is proposed and prototype is developed as a proof of concept. The validation is carried out by purposely compromising the authenticity and integrity of the electronic records in the process of transferring from NOARK to Fedora Commons and detecting the failure in either of authenticity or integrity or both before and after archiving the records. The study found out that records archived using our framework have met the authenticity and integrity requirements of archival objects. Records archived using the proposed archival framework are found to improve the evidential value of records for court cases.