Problematizing Post-Custody with the contemporaneity of the Archive Digital Chain of Custody shared and distributed by Systemic Digital Preservation

Abstract

This study aims to problematize post-custody with the contemporaneity of shared and distributed digital custody in Systemic Digital Preservation, contemplating both the paradigm shift and the paradigmatic transition of the archival chain of custody from an analog to a digital environment. For this, we adopted an exploratory research with a bibliographic and documental research. Our main results include problematizing post-custodial archivology, especially in Terry Cook’s view, rethinking the involved concepts, especially those of custody in Systemic Digital Preservation, going through all the environments in the life cycle of documents, i.e., the document management, preservation, and access and diffusion environments. We conclude, that in systemic digital preservation, we must foresee a chain of archival custody resigned to the digital environment, i.e., an archival Digital Chain of Custody (DCC) which must be shared with preservation and information technology administrators and distributed in several locations and storage types, such as in clouds.