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Dear All,
At the moment I am thinking about
introducing checksums as part of our deposit confirmation. We have an electronic
archive with an online ‘do it yourself’ deposit procedure. After
the deposit the content is checked by us and made available for general access
(or not). The depositor receives an email with a deposit confirmation, which
contains a list of deposited files and a license agreement to which the
depositor has consented. In case of a legal dispute about the exact content of
deposited files we have no ‘prove’ that the we are still
maintaining the original file version (or that the current distribution file is
truly based on the original submitted version). If there was a technical problem
with the upload procedure, that also might go unnoticed in some cases (for
instance a truncated csv file). (Confirmed?) checksums seem a good way to
record the originality and integrity of a file.
Do some of you also have been considering
this option? What were your considerations pro/con? Do you know of deposit
procedures that already work with checksums? Are the checksums indeed effective
as legal argument?
One of my hesitations is that the depositor
probably is not eager and maybe even not capable to run checksums on his files
and comparing them with a list in a pdf file. The whole idea of checksums may
be vague or unknown to him/her.
Thanks for any reactions,
With kind regards,
Dr. Henk Koning
Technical Archivist
+31623884125