Whenever information crosses administrative and technological boundaries, as it does in the more permeable world of publishers and libraries, the role of trusted third parties, while critical for authenticity, is harder to develop and maintain. The partnership between libraries and publishers, a crucial link in the ultimate relationship between author and reader, has evolved slowly, at times painfully, over centuries, and will continue to evolve. Nonetheless, the digital environment will still need trusted third parties to store material, and the libraries and publishers will need to agree on protocols for digital publishing and preservation that work as effectively as have those of the past. The technologists replied with skepticism, saying that there is no technological solution that does not itself involve the transfer of trust to a third party. Those technological solutions are as weak or as strong as the trusted third party.
Dependencies mean either nothing or everything.
Jeff Rothenberg argued that you cannot know something is authentic unless you can read it. However, to the archivists, this constituted confusion between meaning and authenticity. In their opinion, you do not need to view the contents of something to say that it is an authentic record. Take, for example, the case of the Rosetta Stone. For centuries, the meaning of the stone was beyond reach, because no one could decipher the codes in which it was written.