Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Edvin Buršić
Concept of creation of
digital originals by digitisation
DOCTORAL THESIS
Supervisor: Hrvoje Stančić, Ph.D.
Zagreb, 2018
Summary
The aim of this PhD dissertation is to determine conditions for acceptance of the digitized document as
authentic to the original analogue document, as being what it purports to be and is free from tampering or
corruption, and that includes internal and external evidence, taking into account physical characteristics,
structure, content and context – and to find the totality of the properties of digitized document which establish
its origin, reliability, credibility and accuracy of its content.
To create this model, the relevant legal framework, technical framework, existing relevant standards and
good practice routines were analyzed. Additionally, it was also analyzed: digital signature, digital stamp, digital
certificate, software for digitization, EXIF standard, RFID, microprint, PIQL's film, XML language and
technical components (image sensors for digitizing), with the goal of producing a model of digitizing analogue
original into digital form that can be considered authentic.
Aforementioned aim was achieved by creating a Model of the process of creating authentic digital
copies in the form of originals by digitization, i.e. determining the conditions for obtaining authentic copies
generated by the digitization of the original in physical form.
To achieve the aim, the method of analysis and synthesis, method of concretization, comparative
analysis method and modeling method were used.
Using the above methods, the conditions under which a digital copy of a document can be considered
equivalent to the original were first established. Terms that meet authentication requirements include: defined,
certified and approved procedures and instructions of the used digitization process, scanner characteristics,
master image characteristics, driver and digitization software characteristics, necessary metadata explaining the
context of the digitized document, requirements for the used application, data repository requirements, control
and supervisory roles and audit trails of the activities carried out within the digitalization process.
Secondly, to achieve authenticity there are 45 requirements that need to be met. Comparative analysis of
the proposed Model and ISO/TR 15801:2009 and ISO/TR 13028:2010 standards established that ISO/TR
15801:2009 technical report meets 32 requirements and ISO/TR 13028:2010 complies with 17 requirements.
These results show that the use of these standards requires additional controls and records to provide sufficient
data to show that a digitized image is an authentic digital copy.
Finally, a digital and digitized document can be printed as a document that, by its properties, is
considered to be an equivalent source if it meets the requirements of printing contextual metadata and data
about the printout of the system that printed the document, data on the person who sent the document to the
print and the data which allows you to find a document in the system all of which are printed in the microprint
format.
Keywords: Digitization, Scanning, Master Image, PDF, XLS, Indexing, Metadata, Conversion,
Microprint, PIQL
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