Paper Management Results in a Signing Frenzy : A study of implementations of digital signatures in Swedish government agencies

Digital signatures is a small and relatively new subject in digital preservation. There has been substantial research made in how to technically preserve a digital signature. However the research regarding the implementation and surrounding practices are relatively unexplored. This thesis analyses documentation from Swedish public sector about digital signature, develop models that express practices, and evaluate them against current normative frameworks within the field of digital preservation. Different government agencies were queried for documentation, which were analysed with Grounded Theory and Policy analysis. This generated a set of models which can be used to implement digital signatures into an organisation. Here we find models for managing user identities, selecting signatures on the basis of document type, researching legal questions, managing personal information and user rights, and for organisation of an implementation project. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archival Science