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Increasing amounts of Europe's cultural and scientific heritage is being created or represented in digital form. The preservation and reuse of these digital assets forms both the cornerstone of future economic growth and development, and the foundation for the future of memory. Addressing the challenges posed by digital preservation poses a major obstacle to the creation of Europe as a dynamic and economically successful knowledge‐based society. Electronic Resource Preservation and Network (ERPANET), the European Commission's major activity under the fifth framework programme of funding, aims to help public and private sector institutions across Europe to improve their knowledge about digital curation and preservation and to enhance their practices.

This article aims to discuss how concepts from the analog world apply to a purely digital environment, and look in particular at how authenticity needs to be viewed in the digital world in order to make some form of validation possible.

The article describes authenticity and integrity in the analog world and looks at how to measure it in a digital environment.

Authenticity in the digital world generally means, in a purely technical sense, that a document's integrity has been checked using mathematical algorithms against other copies on independently managed servers, and that provenance records show that the document has a clearly established succession from a clearly defined original. Readers should recognize that this is different than how one defines authenticity and integrity in the analog world.

Most of the key issues surrounding digital authenticity have not yet been tested, but they will be when the economic value of an authentic digital work reaches the courts.

The purpose of this paper is to define and stimulate interest in a potential new specialty within the information science field.

Sources on digital forensics and digital archeology are discussed, and the topic is examined critically from a librarian perspective. The author examines the possibility of an information science specialty pursuing the reconstruction of “digital palimpsests”, where data that later becomes historically significant has been deleted or partially overwritten on digital media.

The author identifies at least one key incident (the NASA moon landing tapes) where this potential field has already started to be defined. Examination of the literature indicates that emphasis in data recovery to this point has centered on the needs of law enforcement and disaster recovery rather than on the considerations of manuscript preservation, recovery, and curation. The author emphasizes the need for librarians to bring together the skills of multiple fields, especially that of information technology, in order to shape the tools needed to take the lead in “digital palimpsest” recovery.

The author asserts that the recovery of “digital palimpsests” will become important as digital archives age and society's position on what has historical value inevitably shifts. The author further asserts that members of the information science field must actively work to take ownership of the field before it is subsumed by information technology or another discipline less equipped to manage its nebulous considerations effectively.

The UK Office for Library and Information Networking are engaged in a wide range of work in the area of metadata, in cooperation with various partners. Projects on metadata for Internet resource discovery, interoperability and digital preservation all point to the continuing need for something like traditional library services to organise, access and preserve networked information.

Overview of the EC‐funded Open Archives Forum (www.oaforum.org) which supports the dissemination of information about European open‐archives initiatives. This article describes the forum’s activities which consist of workshops, reports, an e‐mail list and Web site.

The greatest challenges with which digital systems present us are the creation and maintenance of reliable records and the preservation of their authenticity over time. It is vital for every organisation that its records be able to stand for the facts they are about i.e. that their content is trustworthy. To meet these challenges the international community of records professionals must develop appropriate strategies, procedures and standards. In this article the author explores the concepts and principles derived from archival diplomatics that should guide the management of electronic records and therefore these developments, as well as drawing conclusions about the nature of the research work required

The purpose of this paper is to show that the digital environment of the early twenty‐first century is forcing the information sciences to revisit practices and precepts built around paper and physical objects over centuries. The training of archivists, records managers, librarians and museum curators has had to accommodate this new reality. Often the response has been to superimpose a digital overlay on existing curricula. A few have taken a radical approach by scrutinising the fundamentals of the professions and the ontologies of the materials they handle.

The article explores a wide range of the issues exposed by this critique through critical analysis of ideas and published literature.

The authors challenge archive and records management educators to align their curricula with contemporary need and to recognise that partnership with other professionals, particularly in the area of technology, is essential.

The present generation owe it to future generations of archivists and records managers to ensure that the education that they get to prepare them for professional life is forward‐looking in the same way.

This paper aims to raise awareness of the educational needs of twenty‐first century archives and records professionals.

This study aims to examine the phenomenon of self-perceived age (SPA) identity for Generation X (GenX) women in the UK. Squeezed between the more ubiquitous “boomer” and “millennial” cohorts, and now with both gender and age stigma-related challenges, this study looks to provide insights for understanding this group for marketing.

This study adopts an existential phenomenological approach using a hybrid structured/hermeneutic research design. Data is collected using solicited diary research (SDR) that elicits autoethnographic insights into the lived experiences of GenX women, these in the context of SPA.

For this group, the authors find age a gendered phenomenon represented via seven “age frames”, collectively an “organisation of experience”. Age identity appears not to have unified meaning but is contingent upon individuals and their experiences. These frames then provide further insights into how diarists react to the stigma of gendered ageism.

SDR appeals to participants who like completing diaries and are motivated by the research topic. This limits both diversity of response and sample size, but coincidentally enhances elicitation potential – outweighing, the authors believe, these constraints. The sample comprises UK women only.

This study acknowledges GenX women as socially real, but from an SPA perspective they are heterogeneous, and consequently distributed across many segments. Here, age is a psychographic, not demographic, variable – a subjective rather than chronological condition requiring a nuanced response from marketers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first formal study into how SPA identity is manifested for GenX women. Methodologically, this study uses e-journals/diaries, an approach not yet fully exploited in marketing research.