What does "data integrity" refer to in digital archives?

Data integrity in the context of digital archives refers to the assurance that digital information remains accurate, consistent, and unaltered over time. This concept is crucial for maintaining the authenticity and reliability of digital records. When creating and managing digital archives, practitioners must implement measures that protect data from corruption, unauthorized alterations, and loss.

Maintaining data integrity involves practices such as using checksums or hash functions to verify that data has not changed unexpectedly, employing secure and reliable storage solutions, and ensuring proper documentation and metadata management to track data provenance. Each of these aspects contributes to building trust in the archived materials, making it essential for archivists and digital information managers.

While other aspects like access speed, file size, and data transfer completeness are important in digital archiving, they do not encapsulate the core concept of data integrity, which fundamentally focuses on the accuracy and preservation of the content itself over time.