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:

New NDSA Report: The Benefits and Risks of the PDF/A-3 File Format for Archival Institutions | The Signal

We’re lucky in the digital stewardship community that our challenges tend to be non life-threatening. Still, when we get fired up about something there is guaranteed to be spirited debate and passionate advocacy on all sides. Such was the case with the release of the PDF/A-3 file format specification in October 2012. We wrote about …

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