I have come to understand documents by analogy with human beings.  Documents are surrogates for people.  They are bits of the material world (stone, clay, wood pulp, and now silicon) that we create to speak for us and take on jobs for us.
 David Levy

When we say that a digital object has "integrity," we mean that it has not been corrupted over time or in transit; in other words, that we have in hand the same set of sequences of bits that came into existence when the object was created.
Clifford Lynch

Both from: Council on Library & Information Resources (May 2000). Authenticity in a Digital Environment. Washington, DC: Author. Available at: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub92/pub92.pdf

These are two of the quotes my professor put on the whiteboard yesterday during our Digital Preservation class on "Authenticity, Integrity & Trust."  I feel like during the discussion, we kept going in circles, which I pointed out.  I do not want to re-post what people wrote without their permission, so I'll try to paraphrase.

It seems that whenever we end up talking about ideas such as "integrity," "authenticity," and "trust," we end up with the same questions:

1) What IS authentic in the digital world?
2) Can a copy be authentic?
3) How much needs to be preserved in order for it to be called authentic?
4) Who figures out what is authentic and what is not?

What burning questions!  But what are the answers to these questions?  We keep circling and circling around them, but I don't know whether we ever find the answers.  I am thinking that we never find a definite answer is because digital preservation is such a new issue.  We have ideas and practices on preserving books, art, and music because professionals have been discussing this for a long time.  We are still developing new types of digital objects, let alone some standards for digital preservation.

Another idea that comes with these questions is "intent."  I discussed this a little earlier in the semester.  It would be much easier to figure out what to do with digital objects if creators left a "will" of sorts for their creations, like "I want these to be preserved, but since I cannot predict the future, please decide for me how you would like to preserve this," or "BURN THEM!"  Maybe not in those words, but wouldn't it be nice?

Anyways, this is a bit muddled, but this post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a while and I want the world to see it.  I don't know what to do with everything right now, but I know what to do on a case by case basis.