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Re: .PDF



Justine Heazlewood said:
> Finally, I should also point out that the Victorian Electronic Records
> Strategy recommends the use of XML to encapsulate the record content (in
> PDF or other suitable form) with metadata related to the record and its
> long term preservation.

First of all, I thank Justine for her comments. The work the VERS Team has
done is outstanding and they deserve much credit. I'm just finishing a
Managing Electronic Records course at the University of Washington and much
of my thinking and philosophy has been influenced by the VERS
recommendations. I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on the
validity of PDF as a long-term format.

One area I am particularly interested in is the record capture and
"encapsulation" of data. The VERS recommends that the captured document be
written to PDF (context) and then encoded in Base64 and then be encapsulated
in XML (content). Then the Content and Context are then encapsulated in a
single XML file.

Justine, et al, do you know of a source where I can learn more about
encapsulation. I'm still a bit unclear as to how it's done.

Cal Lee said:
> And helping record creators to manage them electronically, rather than
> printing them out and then recreating their metadata electronically sure
> wouldn't hurt either.

I agree, I think that automatic capture of source electronic files is
vitally important. One way of doing that, as an alternative to PDF or
printing, scanning and indexing, would be to have the capability of saving a
document as a TIF or JPG or GIF. IMHO that would be a very nice utility,
regardless of preservation format. I've heard scuttlebutt of work on such a
product. Unfortunately, I have yet to see it...

Thanks for the insightful comments all!

Maverick Collier
Records Analyst
City of Bellevue
11511 Main Street
Bellevue, WA  98009
425.452.5291
mcollier@ci.bellevue.wa.us
www.ci.bellevue.wa.us

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