Mark, there's a company in France called SEAL Systems (URL which offers PDF to PDF/A conversion services. I have a paper by Sébastien Legru ([log in to unmask]) and Saïd El Morabiti ([log in to unmask]) of SEAL which may be helpful; it's mostly in French, but you can email the authors, who most probably can read and write English.

At the "Archiving 2007" conference, Frank L. Walker, George R. Thoma, and Marie E. Gallagher of the National Library of Medicine (USA), presented a paper titled " PDF File Migration to PDF/A: Technical Considerations", in which the error rates for this conversion were shown to be very high, particularly when converting to the more rigorous version of PDF/A (the paper can be obtained at http://www.imaging.org/store/epub.cfm?abstrid=34408).

Best regards.

Fred
===================================================================
Frederic J. Grevin
Email: [log in to unmask]
Phone: 212.788.8615
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mark Myers
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2008 13:07

In KY we use PDF (with hope of someday using PDF/a) as our standard for state publications and other "published" documents (we have an archive writer, so film is still our preservation standard) in our data archive.  We also use Microsoft office formats (notably Word and Excel) because it is our state's Enterprise IT Architecture Standard.  I know that Word isn't a good long-term format, but the state will continue to support Word for the foreseeable future, and our state IT folks are incredibly resistant to any open-source software because of the "security issues"  (or the contract with Microsoft - did I say that out loud . . .)   We keep multiple versions of documents in multiple formats (Word and PDF for example).  We have chart modeled after the Library of Congress file formats grid:  http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/ that advises agencies on what formats are the best to use for long-term sustainability and which are the worst.  As long as the information can be converted to something else if needed, we're happy. 

Mark J. Myers
Electronic Records Archivist
Technology Analysis & Support Branch,
Public Records Division,
Kentucky Department for Libraries & Archives
300 Coffee Tree Road PO Box 537 Frankfort, KY 40602-0537
Phone:  (502)564-8300 ext. 244
Email:  [log in to unmask]
www.kdla.ky.gov

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