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Re: .PDF



Maverick Collier wrote:
> 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...

I'm not sure that I would agree with this approach to saving most
born-digital electronic records.  Page images are just that: images of
pages.  A huge amount of machine-readible content, context, structure
and important metadata would be lost if a Microsoft Word document, for
example, is saved as a page image.  It's text can no longer be searched,
it's document properties will be gone, relationships to linked and
embedded objects will become difficult or impossible to identify, hidden
codes and macros will be gone,...

For analog documents that are being digitized, TIFF master files are a
(relatively) stable way of maintaining the physical appearance of the
pages.  OCR and very resource-intensive arrangement, description and
indexing are then necessary to provide convenient access to meaningful
information within them.  But for records that were created
electronically from the start, a lot of that information is already
captured at the point of document creation.  Reliability and
authenticity also depend on a large number of factors apart from
physical appearance.

This is becoming increasingly true as the very concept of a page is
significantly altered or even abandoned.  What should be the equivalent
of a page image for a workflow system, relational database, Web site,
email message, geographic information system (GIS) application or
computer aided drafting (CAD) file?  Even when information is broken up
into screens full of information that seem somewhat like pages, those
screen-fulls end up dividing along very arbitrary lines.  An email
message or Web page read on one platform might fill up 10 screens, while
on another it might fill up half a screen.

I would think that in most cases, the archival master copy of an
electronic record would be either its native format (along with metadata
in something like an XML wrapper) or some standard format to which
archival masters are transferred.  In some cases, a convenient online
access copy of that record could be a page image generated from the
master.  But I think, in more cases, the best online surrogate would be
either the native format itself (if one can assume that users will have
the appropriate client software for it) or some format like HTML or
increasingly XML generated from the master, probably on-the-fly.

As pointed out in many of the chapters of the recent (very helpful) book
Moving Theory into Practice, it is important to distinguish between the
archival master copy and the access or reference copy.  In many cases, I
think their formats and implementation will be different.

=======================================================
 Cal Lee
 Electronic Records Project Archivist
 Kansas State Historical Society
 Phone: 785-272-8681, ext. 280         Fax: 785-272-8682
 http://da.state.ks.us/itab/erc/
 http://www.kshs.org/archives/recmgt.htm
                   "Obsolete power corrupts obsoletely."
                                            - Ted Nelson

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