[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: PDF



Extremely troubling of late is that Adobe has jumped to the forefront of the battle for strict
enforcement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  They were the driving force behind the arrest
and imprisonment of Russian programmer Dimitry Skylarov on July 16 after he presented at a conference
in the U.S.  Adobe has since decided to advocate his release from prison, but they still stand firmly
behind their efforts to strictly force the DMCA issue.

This issue hasn't received a great deal of coverage in the mainstream press.  When it has, it's
generally be identified as a concern to "geek activists" and "hackers."  I would urge any archivist
concerned about digital preservation to consider this situation very seriously.  Strict enforcement of
the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA could make the work of archivists all but impossible.
There is a lot of helpful information on this issue, including guidance on how to contact the
appropriate political officials to voice concern (protests are being staged across the country):

Electronic Frontier Foundation
http://www.eff.org/

Jail Time in the Digital Age, article by Lawrence Lessig (highly recommended, though it requires free
registration to the NYT site)
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/30/opinion/30LESS.html

Free Dmitry Sklyarov
http://freesklyarov.org/

Anti-DMCA
http://www.anti-dmca.org/

Planet PDF
http://www.planetpdf.com/

The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World by Clifford Lynch
(kind of long but extremely insightful)
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_6/lynch/index.html

Once again, I would strongly recommend to the archives profession that we not treat this as simply a
"hackers' rights" case.  At stake is the ability to preserve and reuse (i.e. almost everything
archivists are about) any materials that have been stored in proprietary formats that have any sort of
provision for controlling or managing access.  Adobe has traditionally been quite helpful in sharing
and supporting its format specifications, but this recent legal activity could indicate a problematic
effort to control any unauthorized tinkering (or even DISCUSSION of tinkering) with its formats.

As for some of the more specific technical arguments about the use of PDF...

For what it's worth, I also don't think using PDF for the presentation of finding aids is probably the
best approach from a user's perspective.  It's unlikely that most users will gain much from having the
exact same page layout of the original paper finding aid (which they probably didn't using without
mediation in the first place).  An argument could be made for PDF being a cheap format to produce from
paper, and if it's PDF or nothing, then it's hard to argue with PDF.  But I think it introduces huge
compromises as an access mechanism in this format.  Users are often confused by finding aids encoded
in EAD, which was specifically designed to allow fairly sophisticated online search and navigation.
Finding aids that stand as relatively isolated free-standing, page-based documents that require
special plugin software to read will simply make this situation even more difficult for users
inexperienced in the intimate details of archival practice (i.e. almost all users).

I share many of the concerns already expressed about the use of PDF.  A search of the online archives
of this mailing list reveals a number of message posted over the past few years on this subject,
including some ranting I myself produced:

http://listserv.muohio.edu/SCRIPTS/WA.EXE?A2=ind0006A&L=archives&P=R3140

http://listserv.muohio.edu/SCRIPTS/WA.EXE?A2=ind0006A&L=archives&P=R4656

Adobe has made some important new advances in version 1.4 of PDF, which is worth considering.  But I
think most of the pros and cons have been pretty well rehearsed already on this list and elsewhere.
(For example, see
http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews5-1.html#feature2
)

As with any strategy for provision of long-term access to digital materials, it's extremely important
to distinguish between access formats and preservation formats.  These can be the same, but they need
not be, just as we may want to provide digital, microfilm or photocopied versions of some objects to
the average patron, while retaining the master copy in another format.  In the OAIS Reference Model
http://www.ccsds.org/documents/pdf/CCSDS-650.0-R-1.pdf
(oops, there's that PDF format again)
this is the distinction between an AIP (archival information package) and DIP (dissemination
information package).

=========================================================
 Cal Lee
 University of Michigan
 School of Information
 Phone: 734-647-0505
 http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~calz/
 "How can I know what I think because I forgot what I said?"
                                         - Karl Weick, 1979

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
To post a message, send e-mail to archives@listserv.muohio.edu

Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>