Authentication and Online Document Repositories

Between online law journals, faculty scholarship, and digital libraries, most institutions are developing online repositories. And although it has only arisen in the context of government information, the issue of document authentication is significant for all types of digital repositories.

In this session, we will discuss both the importance of authentication as well as some aspects of the topic that may be overblown. We will then discuss some of the practical aspects of implementing an authentication scheme. This will include a discussion of document tagging to establish provenance, digital signatures, and dealing with documents in different formats.

The first half of the presentation assumes no technical knowledge. The second half will assume a basic understanding of meta-tagging and common document formats (HTML, PDF, JPG, XML).