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Showing posts from March, 2013

Some thoughts on pdf/a 3

As a digital archivist, I need to keep my ear to the ground with regard to new file formats, particularly when they are billed as being suitable for long term preservation. This is why I attended a DPC event today on the new version of the pdf/a standard (version 3). With pdf/a the clue is in the name, the ‘a’ stands for ‘archive’. The original pdf/a file format was one that was the source of endless debate in my previous job at the Archaeology Data Service (see summary blog pos t). It is a format that we eventually embraced as an acceptable preservation format for documents deposited with us in standard pdf format. The self-contained nature of pdf/a also provides an excellent format for providing on-line access to reports, having far greater longevity than standard pdf files, some of which were starting to produce error messages ten years after deposit – again there is a related blog post on this issue – a problem I was grappling with in my last couple of months working at the ADS