Building Foundations for Digital Records Forensics: A Comparative Study of the Concept of Reproduction in Digital Records Management and Digital Forensics

The Digital Records Forensics project is a research collaboration among the fields of digital records management, law, and police investigation. It seeks to develop concepts and methods for determining the authenticity of digital records when they no longer exist in their originating environment. The project began with comparative studies of scholarly literature in each field to lay a conceptual foundation on which other research methodologies, such as analysis of case law, case study, and ethnography, can be designed and executed. The project expects that this conceptual foundation, along with findings from the other methodologies, will facilitate the proposal of a new discipline called digital records forensics, which will be beneficial to all relevant professions, with complementary strengths deriving from each participating field. This article reports on one of the comparative studies, which examined the concept of reproduction in the fields of digital records management and digital forensics. It presents findings of this examination as well as implications for both fields, with special emphasis on digital records management.