Securing access to complex digital artifacts - Towards a controlled processing environment for digital research data

Abstract

Providing secured and restricted access to digital objects, especially access to digital research data, for a general audience poses new challenges to memory institutions. For instance, to protect individuals, only anonymized or pseudonymized data should be released to a general audience. Standard procedures have been established over time to cope with privacy issues of non-interactive digital objects like text, audio and video. Appearances of identifiers and potentially also quasi-identifiers were removed by a simple overlay, e.g. in text documents such appearances were simply blackened out. Today's digital artifacts, especially research data, have complex, non-linear and even interactive manifestations. Thus, a different approach to securing access to complex digital artifacts is required. This paper presents an architecture and technical methods to control access to digital research data. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.