Abstract
Archivists are faced with the challenge of ensuring access, preservation, security and storage of a rapidly growing quantity of records. The life span of records may be reduced by continuous and frequent manipulation, yet these same records might be of high interest to many scholars or journalists. These documents may also contain confidential information. One solution to these problems is to create digital proxies of these original documents. Opportunities for manipulation and access of digital documents are increasing at a steady pace. Based on an extensive survey of this field and with the specific needs of archivists in mind, this thesis presents an architecture for a digital system for archiving digital reproductions. The issues of storage, retrieval and networked environment are presented. manipulation in. a collaborative fashion in a networked environment are presented. Digital redaction, which constitutes the main theme of the thesis, is further elabo rated. Digital redaction methods and commonly used techniques employed in the editing of documents are presented. Digital redaction tools that allow users to edit textual image documents have great potential in the context of digital archives. This thesis describes CIRT, a Collaborative Image Redacting Tool designed to provide specific manipulation and editing of electronic documents by archivists. The prototypical implementation of this tool is used as a method of investigation of research issues in digital redaction of archival material by archivists. CIRT is composed of an individual editing tool, synchronous and asynchronous collaborative editing tools, a document viewer and a document access manager.
Coquelin, Valerie (1997). Digital redaction. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /ETD -TAMU -1997 -THESIS -C675.