Digital objects or entities present us with particular problems of an acute nature. The most acute of these are the issues surrounding what constitutes identity within the digital world and between digital entities. These are problems that are important in many contexts but, when dealing with digital texts, documents, and certification, an understanding of them becomes vital legally, philosophically, and historically. Legally, the central issues are those of authorship, authenticity, and ownership; philosophically, we must be concerned with the sorts of logical relations that hold between objects and in determining the ontological nature of the object; and historically, our concern centers around our interest in chronology and the recording of progress, adaptation, change, and provenance. Our purpose is to emphasize why questions of digital identity matter and how we might address and respond to some of them. We will begin by examining the lines along which we draw a distinction between the digital and the physical context and how, by importing notions of transitivity and symmetry from the domain of mathematical logic, we might attempt to provide at least interim resolutions of these questions.

The fourth in our series of articles on statistics for clinicians focuses on how we determine the appropriate number of subjects to include in an experimental study to provide sufficient statistical “power”.

This paper examines three approaches to increasing awareness in an academic setting: a discussion session, a checklist and a web based tutorial. All three are found to be effective in raising motivation and understanding of security because they present the issues in an accessible, interesting way. The research for the paper was funded by the JISC Committee for Awareness, Liaison and Training as part of a project on the human and organisational issues associated with network security. http://litc.sbu.ac.uk/calt/

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show that the digital environment of the early twenty‐first century is forcing the information sciences to revisit practices and precepts built around paper and physical objects over centuries. The training of archivists, records managers, librarians and museum curators has had to accommodate this new reality. Often the response has been to superimpose a digital overlay on existing curricula. A few have taken a radical approach by scrutinising the fundamentals of the professions and the ontologies of the materials they handle.Design/methodology/approachThe article explores a wide range of the issues exposed by this critique through critical analysis of ideas and published literature.FindingsThe authors challenge archive and records management educators to align their curricula with contemporary need and to recognise that partnership with other professionals, particularly in the area of technology, is essential.Practical implicationsThe present generation owe it to future generations of archivists and records managers to ensure that the education that they get to prepare them for professional life is forward‐looking in the same way.Originality/valueThis paper aims to raise awareness of the educational needs of twenty‐first century archives and records professionals.

This, the third of our series of articles on statistics in veterinary medicine, moves onto the more complex concepts of hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. As these two areas are widely discussed in many clinical research publications, an awareness of the underlying methodology behind their use is essential to appreciate the information they convey.