Provenance: an archival perspective

Archival provenance is a complex concept, the sum of different factors that altogether trace archival records back to their creation and through their management and use. Provenance plays a major role in different archival functions, from arrangement and description to preservation. Therefore, principles and methods for capturing and representing provenance have been developed over a long time in the archival domain. However, further research in this area is needed to cope with the challenges and opportunities of new technology—on the one hand, the digital environment has made it extremely easy to mix and re-use digital objects, to a point that it is often difficult to trace provenance; on the other hand, tools like Resource Description Framework (RDF) can be used to represent provenance through new standards and models.