Feds help create PDF archiving standard: We’ve written about this initiative before. Looks like it’s moving ahead.
The committee hopes to release a draft of the PDF/A standard by early next year with a final standard out by the end of 2005, said committee member Stephen Levenson, who works in the administrative office of the U.S. Courts.
Briefly, the idea is to create a simplified subset of the PDF format so that PDF documents created today can still be opened and worked with, say, 20 years from now.
The Long Now Foundation: library: This is a really good essay on the lack of longevity with digital media. It's not just the media itself that degrades, but the file formats. Computer scientist Danny Hillis notes that we have good raw data from previous ages written on clay, on stone,…
PDF-A: A New Digital Preservation Format: There's a new movement to persuade Adobe to freeze a subset of the PDF format and guarantee its integrity for a certain number of years so that archivists can ensure people can access the content in the future. "Despite its advantages, PDF itself is not…