Computational Archival Science is a Two-Way Street

Since its definition in 2018 much of the literature written about CAS has been about archives adopting computational theories, methods and resources. Very little has been written about computational professionals adopting archival theories, methods, or resources. The authors believe that CAS could be substantially enriched if some archival theories, methods, and resources were adopted by computational professionals in developing the systems that create and store vast troves of data. For the purposes of this paper, we will focus on two archival resources – ISO 14721 (OAIS) and ISO 16363 (Trustworthy Digital Repositories). These two resources offer recommendations for long term preservation of digital assets, maintaining understandability of those assets through time, and building trustworthy digital repositories to maintain the provenance and integrity of the repository’s collections in such a manner as to provide substantial evidence of the authenticity of the data that it provides to its consumers.