Hi Chris,

your not crazy and not paranoid. You are the pregressive thinker and it is 
indeed no traditional thinking to criticize permanent DIGITAL retention 
and  I'm sure that no one is in this field as safe as houses. There are 
countless open questions related to format (pdf, pdf-a, tiff etc.), storage 
medium (tapes, dvd, cd etc.), software, hardware, data convertion, 
migration etc. etc.

It should be of common interest for companies to store its important 
documents with permanent retention periods as safe and as true to the 
original as possible.

But there COULD be a new solution: Digital Microfiches! Within the ARCHE-
project ("Arche" [germ.] = "ark") the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical 
Measurement Techniques IPM in Freiburg/Germany has developed an laser 
recording technology for accurate long-term storage of analog originals and 
digital data on preservation color microfilm. Among others the Fraunhofer 
IPM was working together with the "Landesarchiv" (the departement of 
archives) Baden-Wuerttemberg, the university library of Stuttgart and the 
MicroArchive Systems company.

Please find further informations here: 

http://www.ipm.fraunhofer.de/fhg/ipm_en/solutions_services/laserimaging/arch
ivelaser/concept.jsp

In reference to your further questions I refer to MOREQ (Model Requirements 
for the Management of Electronic Documents and Records). In the related 
document you will find by clicking the link, you will get a lot of answers, 
questions, ideas etc. you are looking for.

http://www.cornwell.co.uk/edrm/moreq.asp#moreqdownload

Hope, that I was able to give you some advice.

Mario Rieger
Records Manager
Legal Affairs & Health Care Compliance
Janssen-Cilag GmbH
Raiffeisenstr. 8 - D 41470 Neuss - Germany
phone: +49 (0) 2137 955 320
fax: +49 (0) 2137 955 683
eMail: [log in to unmask]

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