Trustworthy Digital Images and the Cloud: Early Findings of the Records in the Cloud Project

Abstract

Digitized and born digital images are being created and disseminated at an ever-increasing rate as the by-products of business activities and the residue of organizational culture. In the past decade, the popularity of digitization as an archival activity aimed at preserving vulnerable archival materials and providing increased access to archival collections has presented archivists with a number of challenges including: platform interoperability, access controls, scalable infrastructure and privacy and rights management. The Cloud presents a range of solutions to the problems posed by managing large data sets such as digital image collections; however, at this early stage the benefits and risks associated with cloud-based services are still being identified. This paper will discuss the current state of digital imaging and highlight key issues in the creation and use, management, and preservation of digital images as trustworthy records in the context of an evolving online environment.