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Mr. PDF goes to Washington
By PDFZone
2003-11-20
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Acrobat and PDF figure into the future of the U.S. government plans, if a brand-new General Accounting Office testimony transcript is any indication.Managing and
preserving electronic records on behalf of the federal government poses
challenges, said Linda D. Koontz, director of information management issues for
the General Accounting Office--the government watchdog agency that "follows the
money"-- in recent testimony before the House Subcommittee on Technology,
Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations, and the Census, part of the
House Committee on Government Reform.
She gave Congress the Cliff's Notes
of a giant report released last year--"Information Management: Challenges in
Managing and Preserving Electronic Records"--and an update on how the National
Archives and Records Administration (NARA) should attack the problem of keeping
electronic records for the long haul.
Technically, the GAO points out,
the problem isn't necessarily keeping electronic records , but rather keeping
them accessible "as computer hardware, application software, and even storage
media become obsolete."
The solution, Koontz said, is three-pronged: 1)
Keep policies up to date as new formats come along; 2) stress to senior
management the importance of keeping good electronic records; and 3) build a
policy and technology infrastructure--and secure the funding--to support an
advanced Electronic Records Archive (ERA) system.
How does PDF fit into
all this? Basically, it's one of the few formats that count. Acrobat files,
unlike Microsoft Word or HTML files, are accepted into the permanent
record.
"NARA accepts certain formats for archiving electronic records
that are in text-based formats, such as databases and certain text-based
geographic information system files," Koontz said. "In addition, NARA accepts
e-mail records and attachments, several forms of scanned images of text files,
and PDF files. It does not accept Web pages, word processor files, or relational
databases."
The agency does acknowledge that its policies aren't quite
caught up to the modern way recordkeeping is done: electronically and
decentralized, i.e., from the computer desktop as opposed to from a central
office. But the GAO can see progress being made:
"In the year since our
report was issued, NARA has taken steps to improve its guidance and address the
lack of technology tools," Koontz said. "In response to our recommendations, it
has devised a reasonable strategy for raising awareness among senior agency
management."
That's a good thing, because technology seems to have
sneaked up on high-ranking officials while they weren't paying attention. As
electronic documents, PDFs included, infiltrated and cross-pollinated among the
rank and file sitting in cubes throughout the greater D.C. metro area,
permanently archiving the more important files remained a "low priority," said
the GAO. NARA wasn't watching this process unfold, either, although it should
have been conducting inspections and working to understand the evolution of
electronic documents.
In the last year, things have begun to change. It's
not all sunshine and roses, though. NARA "has devised a comprehensive approach
to improving agency records management that includes inspections and
identification of risks and priorities, but its approach does not include
provisions for using inspections to evaluate the efficacy of its government-wide
guidance, and an implementation plan for the approach has yet to be
established."
And once that's all figured out, then there's still the
complex matter of acquiring the electronic records repository, which GAO thinks
is a good thing. That is, if NARA can iron out its security implementation,
which at present is lacking in the overall plan, and stick to a schedule and
budget for setting the archive up.
Reading the tea leaves in Koontz's
testimony, PDFs look to be part of the government's electronic documentation for
the present and considerable future. How they will be preserved for future
generations, however, still seems to be very much up in the air.
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