From: "Clifford Lynch" <CNI-ANNOUNCE@cni.org>
Sender: <cgplmgr@cni.org>
To:  CNI-ANNOUNCE
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2014 14:40:00 -0500
Message-ID: <redirect-25724133@cni.org>
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Subject: NSDA Report on Implications of New PDF/A-3 Standard
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I wanted to share the announcement of a new report from the National 
Digital Stewardship Alliance on the PDF/A-3 file format specification 
that was released in late 2012.  The PDF/A specifications are fairly 
widely used to define a "more preservable" subset of the hugely 
complex general PDF specification (A is for "archival"). The new 
"incremental" upgrade to PDF/A raises some very nasty issues for 
institutions relying on this specification in an archival context; at 
the very least, migration to this new version is going to take some 
careful consideration, and potentially some substantial expense and 
disruption. There's a helpful short overview on the Library of 
Congress Digital Preservation blog at:

http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/02/new-ndsa-report-the-benefits-and-risks-of-the-pdfa-3-file-format-for-archival-institutions/

The full report is at

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/working_groups/documents/NDSA_PDF_A3_report_final022014.pdf

Many thanks to NDSA for alerting the community to this serious 
potential problem, and for a good analysis of the issues involved.

Clifford Lynch