Tiered Community Recommendations for Content Authenticity and Provenance (TCR4CAP)
Audio-Visual Working Group
The Tiered Community Recommendations for Content Authenticity and Provenance (TCR4CAP) framework 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.
Current version
TCR4CAP: Tiered Community Recommendations for Content Authenticity and Provenance, with a focus on LAM collections content impacted by artificial intelligence, v.0.2, published September 8, 2026 (PDF). Draft for public comment open until October 15, 2026. (Note that version v.0.2 only updates a URL location for a reference in v.0.1.)
Submit comments to Kate Murray at [email protected]. Comments will be compiled and shared prior to the next published version.
Related FADGI Project: CAP Environmental Review and Registry for Formats, Tools and Mechanisms
Supporting the TCR4CAP framework for organizational decision-making is a point-in-time environmental scan effort called the Content Authenticity and Provenance for Audiovisual Collections: An Environmental Review (link leads to external GitHub repository.) Led by FADGI contractor Dave Rice, the CAP Environmental Review provides an overview of CAP metadata for digital audiovisual collections, covering both digitized and born-digital materials. It examines the current state of CAP-related tools, formats, and mechanisms available to the audiovisual preservation community, with particular attention to free and open source software (FOSS) and to the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) Content Credentials specification as the emerging technical standard for signed provenance manifests. The review provides a reference for understanding what exists in the ecosystem and how each component relates to content authenticity and provenance. Note that this work is tightly scoped at this time to audiovisual content but may expand in the future.
News
Blog post: New Resources from FADGI on Content Authenticity and Provenance for AI-impacted Content, The Signal blog, September 17, 2026
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)
Last Updated: 09/18/2026