salvestist

Salvestist is a term used in digital preservation and data management to denote a discrete preserved record or snapshot of a resource at a specific moment. In practice, a salvestist captures the essential content and context of a resource to support long‑term storage, retrieval, and verification.

A salvestist typically includes a bitstream or content portion as well as metadata such as a timestamp, source identifier, format, size, and provenance information. It may also include a cryptographic hash or checksum to ensure integrity and a record of access permissions and rights. The combination of content and metadata helps establish a verifiable, auditable state of the resource at the time the salvestist was created.

Key characteristics include immutability (the stored version is not altered), versioning (new salvestists are created for updates), and provenance tracking (the origin and history of the resource are preserved). This makes it possible to verify authenticity and reproduce past states, even if the original resource changes or becomes unavailable.

Creation and use: Salvestists are produced by archival workflows, data-management systems, or repository platforms during ingest, snapshotting, or backup operations. They can be stored as file-based objects within a digital repository or as metadata records in a database, often referencing the original resource.

Relationship and distinctions: Salvestist is related to concepts such as snapshot, archival copy, and data provenance, but its definition is not standardized across organizations. In some contexts the term is used informally to describe any stored state of a resource.