{"id":25,"date":"2006-05-25T20:19:45","date_gmt":"2006-05-26T04:19:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=25"},"modified":"2006-05-25T20:19:45","modified_gmt":"2006-05-26T04:19:45","slug":"long-term-document-archival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/long-term-document-archival\/","title":{"rendered":"Long-term Document Archival"},"content":{"rendered":"

Technology is moving ever faster and faster.\u00a0 And that means change.\u00a0 Just over the last 20 years we’ve seen digital storage media shrink to smaller and smaller\u00a0physical dimensions while\u00a0storage capacities\u00a0have exploded to phenomenal capacities.\u00a0 Just consider that PC World<\/a> published this week their review of terabyte hard-drives<\/a> in the sub-$1000 range.\u00a0 If there aren’t already Moore’s law equivalents for storage there should be; one that explains the ever increasing growth of media capacities, and another that explains how people\u00a0manage to keep pace to\u00a0consume\u00a0any new storage capacity that’s created.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But\u00a0on the\u00a0black side\u00a0to the wonder of this ever-improving technology are the many orphaned hardware ancestors to today’s storage units.\u00a0 There is never any backwards compatibility.\u00a0 Whenever you upgrade storage, data needs to be migrated forward and away from the media that has become obsolete.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But not only the media used to store the data, the formats used to represent and assign meaning to the data also follow rapid cycles\u00a0that lead to obsolescence.\u00a0 Applications rise and fall in popularity.\u00a0 And since most application data formats are proprietary, being able to read and understand data created by an application even five or ten years ago can be a problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Saving data files in a format that is non-proprietary and publicly documented is the safest way to go.\u00a0 ASCII or UniCode text files are top choices for safe long-term storage, but realistically, most electronically stored data\u00a0that needs to be archived for long periods of time is much more complex than what can be represented\u00a0by just text.\u00a0 XML comes to mind as a possible solution, but while using XML can add some structure to the text,\u00a0it doesn’t\u00a0provide any graphical or formating capabilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One file format that has become universally accepted is Adobe’s<\/a> PDF<\/a> (Portable Document Format).\u00a0\u00a0PDF has achieved acceptance in a very short period of time.\u00a0 It’s roots go back to PostScript<\/a> which has been around since the ’70s, but PDF has only been around since the early ’90s.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Standard PDF files though are not self-contained.\u00a0 There are dependencies of PDF files on fonts and other data that are external to the file.\u00a0 Trying to view these files years later on systems where that external data doesn’t exist any more could mean that the files won’t render correctly.<\/p>\n

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM<\/a>) along with the Association for Suppliers of Printing<\/a>, with direction<\/a> from Adobe, have pushed through a standard known as ISO 19005-1<\/a>, also known as PDF\/A<\/a>-1.\u00a0 The standard was approved<\/a> in late 2005.<\/p>\n

PDF\/A\u00a0is based on the\u00a0PDF version 1.4<\/a>\u00a0specification, the version of PDF that was used in Adobe Acrobat version 5.\u00a0 (Currently Adobe’s Acrobat family<\/a> of products is on version 7 and version 8 is expected soon.\u00a0 Version 5 is no longer supported by Adobe.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

The \/A of PDF\/A refers to an archival format.\u00a0 PDF\/A contains specification for file self containment, embedded fonts, device-independent color, XMP metadata<\/a>, and tagging.<\/p>\n

The current wide-spread acceptance of PDF and PDF’s flexibility for specifying very rich content plus\u00a0standardization of the PDF\/A\u00a0seems like\u00a0a good step forward for achieving a viable long-term document archival strategy.<\/p>\n

The problem is that technology keeps changing.\u00a0 PDF has been with us only for about 15 years and the PDF\/A standard approved in 2005 is based on technology circa 2000.\u00a0 The standardization committee is already hard at work on\u00a0upgrading the specification to versions\u00a0PDF\/A-2 and PDF\/A-3.\u00a0 Things that are to be added include JPEG 2000 support, digital signatures, 3D graphics, audio, video, …\u00a0 We’ll assume that backwards compatibility will be a top priority for the new versions.<\/p>\n

So there is some hope that documents stored with PDF\/A will still be readable a century from now.<\/p>\n

(Formtek<\/a> is a partner member of the Adobe Solutions Network.)<\/p>\n

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Technology is moving ever faster and faster.\u00a0 And that means change.\u00a0 Just over the last 20 years we’ve seen digital storage media shrink to smaller and smaller\u00a0physical dimensions while\u00a0storage capacities\u00a0have exploded to phenomenal capacities.\u00a0 Just consider that PC World published…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

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