ABSTRACT
Records are increasingly born digital and, in the future, large proportions of those records deemed to be archival, in the sense of having long term cultural or historical significance, will be of this type. This chapter seeks to explore what this change might mean for the way in which individuals experience, understand, and judge such material to be authentic and “the real thing” when viewed in a cultural heritage context. The chapter will give the results of research in which individuals were presented with born-digital materials which had already been differentiated through their inclusion in digital “archives” of one sort or another in order to gauge how those materials were regarded, particularly in respect of their being authentic and “the real thing.”
