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The short lifespan of digital signatures presents a challenge to the long-term preservation of digitally signed records. It can undermine attempts to presume, verify or assess their authenticity. This paper aims to investigate the challenges of the expiration of digital signatures in the context of digital archiving.

The paper identifies requirements for the long-term preservation of digitally signed records and compares them with the existing approaches. The characteristics, operational procedures and requirements of the technologies used for digital signatures are combined with the archival requirements to design a new model.

The paper proposes a new model of a blockchain-based system, which can be combined with any digital archive to assist the process of long-term preservation of digitally signed records.

The proposed model offers a new alternative to the current practice in the long-term preservation of digitally signed records, such as periodic resigning procedures or periodic wrapping of digitally signed records with archival timestamps.

The proposed TrustChain 2.0 model is based on previous research conducted as part of the InterPARES Trust project. It builds on TrustChain 1.0 by including digital signature certificate chain validity information in a blockchain thus avoiding the issues concerning records confidentiality and privacy information disclosure. The paper contributes not only to the development of archival science but also shows archival institutions on how to approach long-term preservation of digitally signed records.

The authors investigate optical character recognition (OCR) technology and discuss its implementation in the context of digitisation of archival materials.

The typewritten transcripts of the Croatian Writers' Society from the mid-60s of the 20th century are used as the test data. The optimal digitisation setup is investigated in order to obtain the best OCR results. This was done by using the sample of 123 pages digitised at different resolution settings and binarisation levels.

A series of tests showed that different settings produce significantly different results. The best OCR accuracy achieved at the test sample of the typewritten documents was 95.02%. The results show that the resolution is significantly more important than binarisation pre-processing procedure for achieving better OCR results.

Based on the research results, the authors give recommendations for achieving optimal digitisation process setup with the aim of increasing the quality of OCR results. Finally, the authors put the research results in the context of digitisation of cultural heritage in general and discuss further investigation possibilities.