Authenticity Management in Long Term Digital Preservation of Medical Records

Managing authenticity is a crucial issue in the preservation of digital medical records, because of their legal value and of their relevance to the Scientific Community as experimental data. In order to assess the authenticity and the provenance of the records, one must be able to trace back, along the whole extent of their lifecycle since their creation, all the relevant events and transformations they have undergone and that may have affected their authenticity and provenance and collect the Preservation Description Information (PDI) as categorized by OAIS. This paper presents a model and a set of operational guidelines to collect and manage the authenticity evidence to properly document these transformations, that have been developed within the APARSEN project, a EU funded NoE, as an implementation of the InterPARES conceptual framework and of the CASPAR methodology. Moreover we discuss the implementation of the guidelines in a medical environment, the health care preservation repository in Vicenza Italy, where digital resources have a quite complex lifecycle including several changes of custody, aggregations and format migrations. The case study has proved the robustness of the methodology, which stands as a concrete proposal for a systematic and operational way to deal with the problem of authenticity management in complex environments.