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Integrity can be defined as “completeness” and “intactness” of the digital objects – inparticular, of their significant properties (nestor 2008, 6; my translation), and can be put atrisk both by malfunctioning technology and by human action (intentionally or by mistake)(nestor 2008, 6). During Ingest, integrity may, among others, be ascertained and protectedby means of virus checking, cyclic redundancy checks or other checksums, as well as byascertaining the validity of the file format. Thus, in order to determine the digital object'sproperties as comprehensively as possible, the following actions should be performed:- Format identification is the process of determining the format to which a digital objectconforms; in other words, it answers the question: “I have a digital object; what format is it?”- Format validation is the process of determining the level of compliance of a digital object to thespecification for its purported format, e.g.: “I have an object purportedly of format F; is it?” […]. 77For the purpose of long-term preservation, such identification and validation processes,which can, for example, be carried out with the tool JHOVE (JSTOR/Harvard ObjectValidation Environment) 78 , should be combined with format validation, i.e. “the process ofdetermining the format-specific significant properties of an object of a given format, e.g.: 'Ihave an object of format F; what are its salient properties?'” (ibid.). 79 Such formatidentification and validation measures clearly exceed the range of “traditional”, nonpreservation-relatedrepository tasks. Nonetheless it would be desirable if availablerepository software included such features as a standard. Thus, if the software madefunctions important in the context of long-term preservation easily available, repositoriesdeciding in the future to begin implementing long-term preservation strategies would findthat their collections are – at least to some extent – already prepared for suchpreservation efforts, a circumstance that might make it considerably easier for them todecide taking a step towards long-term preservation.Both authenticity and integrity of files may be protected by making use of secureconnections (e.g. by means of SSL or HTTPS protocols) for file and metadata upload bysubmitting authors. In the context of institutional and subject repositories, this not onlyhelps to protect the personal information authors give about themselves when submittinga digital object (i.e. information which will not be visible in the public record for thepublication), but also prevents third parties from interfering with the submission. In order toidentify and authenticate a depositor, many repositories work with user accounts and log77 http://hul.harvard.edu/jhove/ – 03.11.2009.78 Another freely available tool for format identification is DROID (Digital Record Object Identification), whichwas developed by the UK National Archives. It is available for download from http://droid.sourceforge.net/.Together with JHOVE and other tools, DROID forms part of FITS (File Information Tool Set), an opensource tool which “combines the abilities of many different open-source file identification, validation, andmetadata extraction tools. The File Information Tool Set (FITS) acts as a wrapper around these tools,invoking, normalizing, and combining their output” (Spencer et al. 2009; no pag.). Further formatidentification and validation tools are listed in the “Preservation-related Tools” section of the IDEALS(Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship) Wiki athttps://services.ideals.uiuc.edu/wiki/bin/view/IDEALS/Internal/PreservationTools – 03.11.2009.79 In this context, so-called format registries play an important role. Among the most well-known registries arethose built up by the PRONOM or GDFR initiatives, both of which “joined forces” in April 2009 to form theUnified Digital Formats Registry (UDFR) (http://www.gdfr.info/index.html – 03.11.2009).28