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Official, Authenticated, Preserved, and Accessible: The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

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The following guest post is by Butch Lazorchak, a digital archivist at the Library of Congress.  It is cross posted on The Signal.

Digital technology makes documents easy to alter or copy, leading to multiple non-identical versions that can be used in unauthorized or illegitimate ways. Unfortunately, the ease of alteration has introduced doubt in users’ minds about the authenticity of many of the digital documents they encounter.

What happens when this is only in digital form? (Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

Lawyers are understandably concerned with issues of authenticity, but librarians and archivists bring value in that the archival processes of provenance and authenticity have long helped their patrons accept the authority of documents. These processes can be readily applied to digital materials, and if the approach can be compelled through the force of law, all the better.