Ensuring our research is preserved for years to come: Points to be covered Ensuring our research is preserved for years to come: Existing files. Future files. Plus Sharing files across our Research Group. Sharing our files with partner agencies. 4. Accessing Records Option A Files copied to GG< digital device; either portable hard-drive, USB stick, or the hard-drives of in individual Research Group members, then accessed using Windows Search (Windows XP or later), or Macintosh Finder (Mac OS Leopard or later). Option B Cloud storage, either Service such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Note: Dropbox allows you to store up to 2 GB free of charge but reserves the right to terminate Free Accounts at any time, with or without notice. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, if a Free Account is inactive for ninety (90) days, then Dropbox may delete any or all of Your Files without providing additional notice. Dropbox Pro provides 100GB of storage space at a cost of $9.99 per month (approximately £75.00 per year). Google Drive provide 5GB of free storage space, 25GB for $2.49 per month(approximately £19.00 per year ), and 100GB for $4.99 per month (approximately £38.00 per year ). Loaded onto GG< website, with password protection for restricted access by Research Group members.
What is PDF/A? ‘a file format based on PDF, known as PDF/A, which provides a mechanism for representing electronic documents in a manner that preserves their visual appearance over time, independent of the tools and systems used for creating, storing or rendering the files.’ (ISO 19005-1)
What is PDF/A for? It is ‘for companies, public authorities and private users needing to store digital information for a long period of time – be it 5 years, 50 or 500 – the PDF/A standard is now the clear choice of file format.’ PDF/A in a Nutshell 2.0, by Alexandra Oettler, published by the PDF Association.
Some pretty bold claims. In a non-technical sense, how have they achieved this? Well quite simply they have created a file standard that is completely self-sufficient. Instead of things like fonts and pagination, etc., being drawn from the computers operating system everything that is needed is contained within the PDF/A file itself.
How do you create a PDF/A file? Microsoft Office has supported PDF/A since 2007, so anything created in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access can be saved directly to the PDF/A format. And if you prefer to use one of the free word processing packages, OpenOffice and LibreOffice can create PDF/A files ‘at the click of a button’.
In addition ... Documents, drawings and photo’s can be scanned and saved in the PDF/A format. In the case of text, if scanning incorporates a n OCR not only is the original text preserved for the future but its content becomes searchable too.
So it’s all plain sailing? There is a downside. Extra file information increases the file size considerably. Experience shows our files increased in size by factor of 7 to 8. A pdf reader is required to view the files. Several free readers are available: Adobe Acrobat Reader, Foxit Reader 7, and Softonic PDF Reader, plus least eight more.
Having decided to use PDF/A for our archive files the next step was to incorporate this into our research process ...
Research Process - Existing Files v.0.3
Research Process – Future Files v.0.3