Tiered Community Recommendations for Content Authenticity and Provenance (TCR4CAP)
Audio-Visual Working Group

The Tiered Community Recommendations for Content Authenticity and Provenance (TCR4CAP) guideline is now available for public comment. This document outlines a framework of progressive criteria for evaluating and documenting content authenticity and provenance (CAP), especially for collections content impacted by artificial intelligence (AI). In the libraries, archives and museum (LAM) context, content authenticity is widely defined as “the quality of being genuine, not a counterfeit, and free from tampering, and is typically inferred from internal and external evidence, including its physical characteristics, structure, content, and context” and provenance as “information regarding the origins, custody, and ownership of an item or collection.”

Inspired by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Levels of Digital Preservation, this framework takes an organizational perspective rather than a strictly technology or implementation perspective. It includes technical examples but the underlying structure asks how an organization decides what it needs, incorporates those needs into operations, establishes consistent requirements and demonstrates that those needs are being met.

By breaking down the complex aspects of CAP into a matrix of six evaluation criteria with actions described along four levels that provide increasing assurance of CAP, the aim of this work is to help guide LAM institutions to better plan for, understand, evaluate, and improve their work in accordance with long-standing archival CAP principles.

Related FADGI Project: CAP Environmental Review and Registry for Formats, Tools and Mechanisms

For point-in-time technical capacity for how CAP is addressed in a variety of file formats, open source tools and mechanisms, see the related FADGI-sponsored CAP environmental review and registry on GitHub. Note that this work is more tightly scoped at this time to audiovisual content but may expand in the future.

Current version

TCR4CAP: Tiered Community Recommendations for Content Authenticity and Provenance, with a focus on LAM collections content impacted by artificial intelligence, v.0.1, published August 26, 2026 (PDF). Draft for public comment open until October 15, 2026.

Submit comments to Kate Murray at [email protected]. Comments will be compiled and shared prior to the next published version.

Team Members (in alphabetical order)

Library of Congress:
Curtis, Rachel
Havemeyer-King, Genevieve
Hockstein, Dan
Kelly, Paul
Murray, Kate

Smithsonian Institution:
Sobers, Kira

Community Collaborators:
Hosale, Charlie (MIT Libraries)
Krabbenhoeft, Nick (NYPL)
Martinez, Jérôme (MediaArea/FADGI contractor)
Ng, Yvonne (WITNESS)
Rice, Dave (MediaArea/FAGDI contractor)

Working Groups

Still Image Working Group
This group is involved in a cooperative effort to develop common digitization guidelines for still image materials.

Audio-Visual Working Group
This group works collaboratively on common and sustainable technical guidelines, methods, and practices for digitized and born digital sound recordings and moving images.