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“[t]he repository must obtain complete control of the bits of the digital objects conveyedwith each SIP” (2007, B1.5), does not focus on DRM or similar issues so much but pointsto the fact that digital objects may contain references to other digital objects, and that therepository should attempt to harvest and ingest these objects as well in order to guaranteethat the digital objects it preserves are as complete as possible.Part of the Ingest process is Quality Assurance, during which the repositoryascertains the integrity and authenticity of the SIP before archiving it in the repository.Definitions of either concept abound, and Clifford Lynch's observation, dating back to theyear 2000, that authenticity and integrity are “elusive properties” which, as we try to definethem, “recurse into a wilderness of mirrors, of questions about trust and identity in thenetworked information world” (2000, no pag.), still rings true. 75 Authenticity can beunderstood as a measure for the digital object's “trustworthiness” in the sense that anobject is authentic to the degree that it is what it seems or purports to be (see nestor2008, 7). 76 As Factor et al. note,[a]uthenticity refers to the reliability of the data in the broad sense [...]. To validate authenticity ofa preserved data object provenance is needed, i.e., the documented history of creation,ownership, accesses, and changes that have occurred over time for a given data object. Also ameans is needed to guarantee that data is whole and uncorrupted (integrity). (2009, no pag.)It follows that authenticity strongly depends on the repository's ability to ascertain andguarantee that a digital object was created by the specified author/source at the specifiedtime – information that is also indispensable if the object is to be usable for/in scholarlyresearch – and on a documentation of any transformation the object may have undergonesince submission:Ein wichtiger Aspekt ist, dass das vorliegende Objekt von der angegebenen Quelle und zurangegebenen Zeit erstellt wurde. Ferner schließt Authentizität den lückenlosen Nachweis allerim Sinne der Erhaltungsmaßnahmen durchgeführten Transformationen an den Objekten mit ein.(nestor 2008, 7)Such provenance information is crucial in that in the context of long-term preservation weneed to take into account thatin most cases digital objects cannot be preserved without any change in the bit stream, and wehave to modify the original object to have the ability to reproduce it in the future. Unfortunately,this runs counter to the assumption that preserving authenticity implies retaining the identity andintegrity of a digital object, i.e. free from tampering or corruption. It is a sort of paradox, wherepreservation entails change, while authenticity needs fixity. (Factor et al. 2009, no pag.)software rather than file formats.75 See the DigiCULT thematic issue on “Integrity and Authenticity of Digital Cultural Heritage Objects” (2002)for very similar observations. http://www.digicult.info/downloads/thematic_issue_1_final.pdf – 31.10.2009.“Authenticity” is also the focus of two letters to the editor published in issue 4.2 (2009) of the InternationalJournal of Digital Curation (see Wilson 2009 and Jantz 2009).76 See also the revised version of the OAIS model (May 2009 version for public comment), which definesauthenticity as “the degree to which a person (or system) may regard an object as what it is purported tobe” (1-8). The question of authenticity is also considered by Wilson in the InSPECT 2.2 work package(2007). Wilson draws attention to the fact that rather than adhering to a “broad meaning” of authenticity,with “all the connotations of that much overused word truth,” it makes sense in the context of digital longtermpreservation to “limit 'authenticity' to its archival meanings to do with what a record purports to be andhow it was created. Variations of this definition abound but the central core of the concept is fixed [...]. Forthe UK National Archives assessing authenticity involves establishing the integrity and identity of the object– integrity here referring to the objects 'wholeness and soundness', and identity referring to attributes suchas context and provenance” (Wilson 2007, 4).27