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GCN Home > 09/27/04 issue

Formatting the future

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

To keep documents accessible, agencies face critical choices on software and hardware

Five years ago, U.S. Courts started putting in place an electronic docket-filing system. It would contain records to be kept—and accessed—for decades, if not indefinitely, and that forced project managers to make some tough decisions on electronic formats.

The courts decided on the Adobe Portable Document Format, for two reasons, according to John Brinkema, a senior research computer scientist at the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

First, PDFs preserve the look and feel of the original paper document, an important quality because legal documents frequently make references to other pages within that document or to pages in other documents—even if those records are in electronic form only.

Second, and more important, Adobe Systems Inc. has published the specifications for reading a PDF document. Should the company ever go out of business, the records could be accessed using other software written to Adobe’s specifications.

These days, U.S. Courts has more than 2 billion electronic records in PDF format, spread across almost 200 locations around the country. The federal judiciary is ahead of many agencies in establishing an electronic-records management process.

“Rather than waiting around for the rest of the government to do things, we just did it,” Brinkema said.

When it comes to saving electronic information for the ages, the challenge of choosing the appropriate format is formidable.

A format specifies how to encode a set of data so that it can be accessed by people or other machines. Every software vendor uses formats to encapsulate the data that is generated in its programs.

But given the volatility and constant changes in the IT industry, the formats an agency chooses today might not be around in 10 or 100 years. Horror stories abound of suddenly vital documents locked away on some early, now unreadable, version of WordStar.

“It is hard to preserve digital information without a clear guide to how the information is encoded within a format,” said William LeFurgy, a project manager for the Library of Congress’ Digital Initiatives program.

Compounding this problem is the fact that hardware used to read these formats may also disappear. Who still has equipment to read 5¼-inch floppy disks or punch cards?

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, Content / Record Management, Executive Center, Management



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