Electronic paper (clearly a different product, but with obvious ties to
transient documents) has been an object of Xerox research for more than 10
years, but has never, to my knowledge, reached the marketing stage. It's
been foreshadowed in any number of science-fiction books, including at least
one by William Gibson. Presumably electronic documents could be even more
transient.
I'm certain there are many cases where digital reprints exist with no
original, and this will increase as digitizing projects
proliferate--including ours. The main reason for this will not be because
originals are discarded or fade by design, but because originals
disintegrate or fade due to chemical or mechanical processes including
everything from internal chemistry (thermofaxes) and normal handling and
storage practices (carbon copies) to disasters such as fire and flood. In
many cases we have only photocopies or chemically created copies but no
original as it is. How is that different from digital reprints, in an age
where documents can be altered digitally and then printed?
This would be my argument for trusted digital repositories.
Arel
Arel Lucas, C.A.
Archives/Special Collections Librarian
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Prescott Campus
-----Original Message-----
From: Lanell James [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 10:10 PM
To: Lucas. Arel
Cc: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Xerox Reveals Transient Documents
Just when archivists are debating digital preservation issues and
electronic records management....along comes Xerox will a new
idea.......
Let's discuss the idea of a new paper product in which print
automatically fades away in 16 hours...will this make it to market? OR
what if it does, then what are the implications?
I guess this product does away with the need to suppress of info and
prevent accountability....or what happens if we have digital reprints
but no original?......HMMMM....
LINK: http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/09/07/2243222.shtml
Lanell
-----------
Quoting "Lucas. Arel" <[log in to unmask]>:
> If you do not have images, but only text from the original, you face the
> possibility that the rendered PDF text can be wrong, badly read by the OCR
> program, and/or not reflect changes made in handwriting to the originals.
> In many cases, optical-character-recognition rendering, done to make the
> PDF, cannot read or reflect what is in the original documents because your
> program may automatically decide what is text and what is graphics and
> improperly try to read graphics or "decide" that text is graphics and make
a
> hodgepodge of your page. Trying to correct PDF or other text from
> essentially graphic documents is extremely time-consuming, frustrating,
and
> sometimes impossible.
>
> We've been facing that here as we work to set up a digitization project.
> Published reports can often be simply rendered into PDF without incident,
> but mixed (graphics/text), handwritten, or hand-corrected documents can
> cause problems. One excellent example that we tried scanning first off
was
> a photocopy of a carbon copy that had been hand-corrected as to one
> important mistake. The OCR-text version needed a large investment of time
> to correct due to the difficulty of reading the original, and only an
image
> file could pick up the correction and make it legible. I thought it
> inauthentic to simply correct the stenographer's mistake in the PDF file.
> We do use PDFs as a text-file format. One advantage of an image format is
> that you always have an image from which to correct your text files should
> this not be possible on first pass, or should errors be discovered later.
>
> The PDF format can be used to create image-only files, but then you have
no
> searchable text unless you make one image and one text file of the same
> document. (We've been unable to see and correct the OCR'd "invisible
layer"
> of text in the Adobe "Searchable Image (Exact)," and we haven't been able
to
> get an answer out of Adobe on how to do this.) So you would need to make
two
> files of each document: one image and one text, unless there is nothing
> remarkable about the image (a published document), or no text worth
> searching in a mixed or graphic document. While you're saving two images,
> why not make one of them a TIFF?
>
> You can see in the archives of this list the discussions of the reasons
for
> using the TIFF format for images. One excellent article to which I think
I
> was referred from this list is at
>
http://aic.stanford.edu/sg/emg/library/pdf/vitale/2006-01-vitale-digital_ima
> ge_file_formats.pdf (For those not interested in the history of imaging
> systems, start with #5, page 30, Image File Formats.") The arguments for
> TIFF include the lack of compression (in at least one variety) and its
> likely projection into the future as an imaging format. Note that there
are
> different TIFF formats, and that you will need to be sure that the format
> you choose from your imaging program produces files that can be opened and
> read by other software. (We scanned upwards of 10 images before realizing
> that we were using an incompatible TIFF format.)
>
> So, yes, I agree that your best policy is to save a "master" TIFF file of
> each document image, and a PDF (if that's your chosen format) for
searchable
> text. If you do only one or the other, even assuming a perfectly legible
> textual document, you have lost either the ability to search the text or
the
> ability to correct the searchable text without consulting the original
> document.
>
> Arel Lucas, C.A.
> Archives/Special Collections Librarian
> Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
> Prescott Campus
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Archives & Archivists [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf
> Of Rhue, Monika
> Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 12:19 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Digitization Question
> Importance: High
>
> We are working on a digitization project which involves scanning
> original documents from our archival collection. The web master want to
> scan these letters, correspondence, etc into PDF without creating a
> master file. From my research, we should scan all original documents in
> TIFF as the master files. Maybe the PDF can be the means in which people
> access the documents. It was stated that both the Florida Digital
> Archive and the Deep Blue repository at the University of Michigan find
> this compliance an acceptable archival format.
>
> http://www.fcla.edu/digitalArchive/pdfs/PDFGuideline.pdf#search=%22adobe
> %20acrobat%20professional%20A-1b%20standard%22
>
> http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/about/deepbluepreservation.jsp
>
> However, I want to get the opinion of my colleagues.
>
> Thanks
>
> Nooma Monika Rhue, MLIS
> Archivist/Archival Services Librarian
> Inez Moore Parker Archives and Research Center
> Johnson C. Smith University
> 100 Beatties Ford Road
> Charlotte, NC 28216
> 704-371-6741
> Email: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>
>
>
> <http://archives.jcsu.edu/echo>
>
> A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List sponsored by the
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> A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List sponsored by
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>
--
Lanell E. James
Master of Science in Information School of Information
University of Michigan
[log in to unmask]
A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, www.archivists.org.
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