The Open Preservation Foundation and Digital Preservation Coalition, with support from the European Commission and the PREFORMA project, invite members to a briefing day on preserving PDF at Oxford University on Wednesday 15th July 2015.

PDF is a ubiquitous format for publishing and sharing digital documents. It provides a useful tool for dissemination and because it is designed to ensure that the look and feel of documents does not change from one environment to the next it seems like a promising basis for the preservation of documents. But it also introduces a variety of preservation challenges for those working to preserve digital information for the long term. For example there are numerous tools to help create PDFs means many of which introduce their own subtle variations to the standard. Browsers have become increasingly tolerant of these eccentricities. That helps users in the short term but makes validation harder in the long run. How are organisations beginning to address these and other issues? What makes a PDF a PDF and how can repository managers tell the difference? And what can we do as a community to solve the PDF preservation problem? These are just some of the questions this briefing day will seek to answer.

This briefing day will include an introduction to a new initiative that aims to tackle the complexities of PDF Preservation head on. The veraPDF Consortium has been funded by the PREFORMA Project to develop a comprehensive PDF/A validation tool and policy checker.  This will ultimately provide a definitive take on PDF/A compliance whilst also acting as a method of identifying PDF characteristics that pose a risk to long term preservation. Participants at the briefing day will have a chance to find out what veraPDF plans to deliver. More importantly they will also have an opportunity to contribute to its design.

The full programme is yet to be finalised but speakers will include Betsy Fanning, author of the DPC’s forthcoming 2nd edition Technology Watch Report ‘Preserving with PDF/a’,  Johan van der Knijff from the National Library of the Netherlands, Carl Wilson from the Open Preservation Foundation and Ange Albertini from Google.

Priority registration is available for DPC and OPF members until the 1st July, at which point non-members will be able to register for remaining places.

Who should come?

This briefing day will interest:

• Collections managers, librarians, curators, archivists in memory institutions
• Repository managers in higher education and research institutions
• CIOs and CTOs in organisations with commercial intellectual property
• Records managers and business analysts with requirements for long-lived data or legacy systems
• Vendors and developers with digital preservation and EDRMS solutions
• Researchers with interests e-infrastructure and digital preservation
• Developers with expertise in PDF and related document formats

How to register?

Places are strictly limited and should be booked in advance. Registration will close before the event and early booking is recommended as we expect this event will be popular.  This event is sponsored by the veraPDF project so is free to attend however DPC and OPF members will have priority access to registration. To register see:
http://www.dpconline.org/events/details/95-preserving-pdfs-jul15?xref=124%3Apreservingpdfs-oxford.

OPF members should select the ‘associate member’ category when registering.