From PDF to PDF-Archival

Pat Harris
Executive Director
National Information Standards

Stephen Levenson
Judiciary Records Officer
U.S. Department of Justice

William LeFurgy
Digital Initiatives Program Manager
Library of Congress

Since its introduction in June 1993 Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) has become the de facto open standard for electronic document distribution worldwide. It is now widely used by government, business, and education communities; Google lists over 8 million PDF files. PDF has had a tremendous impact on libraries; increasingly the electronic journals and digital resources acquired by libraries and archives are published in PDF format. The long-term archival capacity of PDF continues to be a nagging concern for all users.

This session will report on the formal standards project NISO is now engaged in to develop a PDF-Archival format and explore the reasons behind this new standard and the problems it will solve. The presenters will also describe how the standard is shaping-up (the issues that have been resolved and those points that are still under consideration), and discuss how this work is expected to evolve.