Archiving – Archiving involves creating digital or film images to meet long-term storage requirements. Publishes, libraries, and governments often have needs in this area. It can involve the creation of high-fidelity digital images to preserve their integrity. It can also involve capturing images to microfilm to ensure a human-readable format of a document will also be available.

A few years ago, a number of organizations, including Adobe, got together and created the PDF/A standard to attempt to ensure digital documents could be read in the future.

Here's a story on the North American efforts of the PDF/A Competence Center.

Here's a story to help you decide the best version of PDF/A for your archiving needs.

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Start-Up Helps Archivists Meet Quality Standards

In 2004, the National Archives Records Administration (NARA) updated its Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access: Creation of Production Master Files - Raster Images. More recently, under the auspicious of the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI), the Still Image Working Group has published new Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials: Creation of Raster Image Master Files.

Typically, these standards are being used by archivists and service bureaus working with heritage materials like bound books, maps, microfilm, catalogues, and periodicals. And that is the market where a Rochester-based start-up, Certifi-Media, has had its initial success. “Those are the markets with real needs for image quality measurement,” said Chris Hosinger, co-founder and CEO of Certifi-Media.

Certifi-Media has developed a suite of products designed not only to test image quality, but then to automatically adjust images with software so they more closely meet standards. To read more about this solution, click here.