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FW: .PDF



Phil Coombs, Washington State Archivist, sent these comments to me and said
it was OK to share them with the list.

The DOCT Electronic File Wrapper report (URL below) looks like it will be
very informative.

Maverick Collier
Records Analyst
City of Bellevue
Bellevue, WA
mcollier@ci.bellevue.wa.us

-----Original Message-----
From: Coombs, Phil [mailto:PCoombs@secstate.wa.gov]
Sent: Friday, June 02, 2000 1:09 PM
To: 'mcollier@ci.bellevue.wa.us'
Subject: FW: .PDF


Maverick:

Perhaps I can offer some enlightenment regarding encapsulation of source
objects.

There are several approaches to maintaining electronic records over time.
The National Archives, through their DOCT work, advocate converting all
records to an open text format.  They are exploring the use of layers of
metadata to identify granular relationships of objects to each other and to
the whole collection.

The Victoria solution (VERS) advocates converting objects into pdf format,
also for the purpose of maintaining readability over time.

The problem with both approaches is that they must "dumb down" the object
during conversion, thereby loosing functions and properties such as macros,
embedded comments and formula, and linked objects.  The prevailing belief is
that technology won't get any smarter in the years ahead and that we should
convert stored objects to a 1985 or earlier format so we can read it in
fifty years.

Sounds fishy to me.  In fact, we can read any object created in the past
forty or so years as long as someone has kept a viewer application to it and
some clue what's in the object.  I'm not saying 'edit' it, just read it.
About the same expectation as converting it to a text or pdf format.


There is, however, a solution about to go public.  It is called
encapsulation of the native object with rich metadata.  In short, it wraps
any (e.g., .dll, .exe, .wpd, .doc, .mpg) object (or collections) with an XML
(or, optionally, HTML) file that contains metadata of the origination's
choice (e.g., Dublin Core, FGDC, WAGILS).  This turns the package into a
markup language file (e.g., .xml or .html) that can be stored independently
of a catalog and 'crawled' to build an accurate index.  When someone wants
to see the object, they unwrap a copy (or original if desired).

For archived objects, a viewer must be maintained that can read the content.
This is a much smaller problem than converting objects to text (for the DOCT
approach see: http://www.sdsc.edu/DOCT/Publications/efw/efw.html#sect23).

I am enthusiastic about the attention to embedded (or wrapped) metadata
added to objects.  The Victoria project team is aware of the newer packaging
approach and will explore it as needed.

Meanwhile, if you or others in your listserv are interested, the link to the
company developing it is:
http://www.hisoftware.com/xmlpackager.htm

Good luck,

Phil Coombs
Washington State Archivist
pcoombs@secstate.wa.gov
360.586.2660

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