Editing Digital preservation (section)

===Integrity===
The cornerstone of digital preservation, "[[data integrity]]" refers to the assurance that the data is "complete and unaltered in all essential respects"; a program designed to maintain integrity aims to "ensure data is recorded exactly as intended, and upon later retrieval, ensure the data is the same as it was when it was originally recorded".<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.cessda.eu/Tools-Services/For-Service-Providers/CESSDA-CDM/Glossary |title=Glossary |website=Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives |access-date=March 28, 2022}}</ref>

Unintentional changes to data are to be avoided, and responsible strategies should be put in place to detect unintentional changes and react as appropriately determined. However, digital preservation efforts may necessitate modifications to content or metadata through responsibly-developed procedures and by well-documented policies. Organizations or individuals may choose to retain original, integrity-checked versions of content and/or modified versions with appropriate preservation metadata. Data integrity practices also apply to modified versions, as their state of capture must be maintained and resistant to unintentional modifications.

The integrity of a record can be preserved through bit-level preservation, fixity checking, and capturing a full audit trail of all preservation actions performed on the record. These strategies can ensure protection against unauthorised or accidental alteration.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Digital Preservation Policy |url=https://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/our-organisation/accountability-and-reporting/archival-policy-and-planning/digital-preservation-policy |date=June 30, 2020 |website=National Archives of Australia |access-date=March 28, 2022}}</ref>

====Fixity====
[[File fixity]] is the property of a digital file being fixed, or unchanged. File fixity checking is the process of validating that a file has not changed or been altered from a previous state.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/pif-presentations/rebecca-SKOS/preservationEvents-FixityCheck.html |title=Preservation Events Concept: fixity check |work=loc.gov |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141014155135/http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/pif-presentations/rebecca-SKOS/preservationEvents-FixityCheck.html |archive-date=2014-10-14 }}</ref> This effort is often enabled by the creation, validation, and management of [[checksum]]s.

While checksums are the primary mechanism for monitoring fixity at the individual file level, an important additional consideration for monitoring fixity is file attendance. Whereas checksums identify if a file has changed, file attendance identifies if a file in a designated collection is newly created, deleted, or moved. Tracking and reporting on file attendance is a fundamental component of digital collection management and fixity.