Provenance in Digital Libraries: Source, Context, Value and Trust

Abstract

Provenance is used in digital libraries to denote authorship, origination or creation, information integrity, rights to re-use and exploit digital content, discovery and linking of data, security, accountability and in the context of digital preservation. The concept is applied in an inter-disciplinary sense in the Bodleian Digital Library, alongside the use of W3C standard PROV, as a useful data modelling framework for the Oxford University Research Archive. The application of provenance in the metadata of digital libraries is discussed in terms of entities, agents, activities, locations, concepts and annotations. We consider research challenges associated with provenance in digital libraries, including potential extensions to PROV, crowd-sourcing, applications to new forms of data and determinations of trust.