Development and Validation of Requirements for Evidential Value for Assessing Trustworthiness of Digital Records over Time

The issue of trust in the management of digital records has been a topic of research for a number of
years. During this time most researchers have concentrated on the nature and meaning of the record
itself, rather than the potential use of the record as evidence of the originators' origins, functions, and
activities. Through a comparison of trust in the real world and trust in the digital world, we demonstrate
the importance of evidential value for the objective assessment of the trustworthiness of digital records.
In this paper we investigate, identify, and specify the requirements for evidential value, based on our
record's life-cycle model. We validate these requirements by using an online questionnaire survey.
Finally, we show briefly how these requirements can be used in the assessment of the trustworthiness of
records over time. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) it provides a record’s life-cycle model
which is suitable for the assessment of the trustworthiness of digital records; 2) it proposes and validates
the requirements for evidential value for assessing the trustworthiness of digital records.