British Library digital archiving project enters final stages

National Digital Library to authenticate British Library's collection

The British Library is entering the final stages of a project to secure the integrity of its National Digital Library.

‘We’ve been developing the system and need to develop it further which is why we are in the process of obtaining additional resources to add extra capability around our digital signing of objects process,’ said Sean Martin, head of architecture and development at the British Library.

The last part of the project involves cryptographic solutions to assure authenticity by sealing a book or object cryptographically at the time it is received by the library.

‘The process of creating a digital signature is highly analogous to the signing of a letter, it’s a mark to affirm the content of the object,’ said Martin.

A secure timestamp and time-based audit trail validates the authenticity of documents so that any tampering can be detected.

‘In 30 years time a file on a file system might well be on the tenth generation of hardware and had many administrators altering it,’ said Martin.

‘The fact there is a file on a file system is not a very strong method of assurance and that’s why we felt we needed a stronger assurance process for the authenticity of an object,’ he said.

Martin says the digital signature is bound to the physical object with a number of industry standard algorithms which are implemented with a document sealing engine from vendor nCipher.

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