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Changing Notions of Trust in the Document [ read paper ] Keywords: Authenticity, integrity, digital culture, social aspects of information technology, documents and society, trust management. In the archival profession we are continually dealing with the representation of the digital document. To a great extent, those attributes and characteristics that make-up a typical document in the past do not carry over to documents in the present. Technology has provided a twist to the notion of the document, challenging our use and core definition of the document. This problem stifles archives, libraries and even museums as they try to embrace technology’s improvement of the document while at the same time maintaining its traditional complexities and intricacies. These attributes are inherent in all documents. They are the essence of a document, making it unique and distinguishable from mere information. The document as a physical text, in paper form will inevitably become obsolete. We will have to deal with this change. In the future (perhaps already), potential donations of private papers and materials will be accessioned through "data dumps" from the hard drives and computers of the donors. This digital culture has created a number of problems that, while they may seem new, only restate variations of old problems. Issues at hand concerning the digital document such as integrity, authenticity, originality and permanence have always been central to the document throughout time. It no longer suffices, and sometimes is not even possible to merely "print-out" whatever we may wish to save. In this paper, I hope to deal with just one of the issues that hinders the survival of the digital document: the issue of trust. My goal for this topic is to explore how the concept of trust as a fundamental feature of documents, has been dealt with over time. By using the document as the primary vehicle to tell this story, I will have produced some elementary ways to deal with the problems we now face in the digital era. It is very much within human nature to think that these issues are unique and that this technology produces new circumstances. However, historians remind us all the time that history has its place, and there are solutions to the present buried in the past. As a secondary goal, I wish to build on this theme and rationalize whether the philosophy of trust have been changing over time, or if indeed the problem of electronic trust is unique to the digital culture. There are a variety of seemingly unrelated topics concerning the issue of electronic trust. When they are threaded together, they become equally important pieces to understanding a larger whole. My first sense is to look at trust from the viewpoint of philosophy. Traditionally, there have been many perspectives from great thinkers whose musings have found their way into the very fabric of documents. From here, it would seem logical to follow the document from its early inception into written culture. What was its original function? How has that changed? Moving away from the past to the more recent future, it would be useful to take a look at the integration of the internet into society. Issues of publishing, versus posting and trusting information found on the World Wide Web are subtopics that will be explored. Trust management in the digital culture can be looked at as an art of negotiation. How has the concept of identity and social interaction changed the idea of trust in the digital age? Similar topics to examine are trust in time and space, and trust in both the individual and collective memory. Matthew Eidson
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last updated 10.june 2003