Shortly after my last entry, I set about creating a Preservation Plan for my PAW-PERS collection of personal documents and mementos. I combined elements of Project Planning that I had experienced while working as an IT professional together with aspects of the preservation planning concepts already documented in the Scoping Document. The Project Plan consists of two documents – a Project Plan Description and a Project Plan Chart.

I sent drafts of these two documents to Chris Hilton, William Kilbride and Neil Beagrie asking for comments. Chris Hilton of the Wellcome Foundation very kindly sent me back his views just before Christmas – in summary, he thought the plans were thorough and that the decision to convert most documents to PDF or PDF/A was a good one. He also suggested keeping the original versions of any documents containing some processing components (such as spreadsheets) which may not be captured within the PDA format; and he endorsed keeping off-site copies.

Neil Beagrie put me in touch with Gabriela Redwine of Yale University who is doing work on Personal Digital Archiving for the DPC (Digital Preservation Coalition). She too provided a positive reaction to the Preservation Plan. So with these two endorsements I set about implementing the plan – the first part of which requires that those documents that need to be retained in their original form are identified; and that the remaining files are converted to PDF/A.

Unfortunately the rigours of Christmas and a subsequent call on my time to help my son and his wife do initial renovation work on their new house, have interrupted progress. However, even the little I have done so far has identified a number of issues: a) conversion of an htm document into a PDF document using my PDF package (eCopy PDF Pro Office) did not produce a good similarity. The most reliable rendition was achieved by copying the htm screen into a Word document and then turning that into a PDF; b) a 2010 article from Ohio State University alerts readers that Word 2007 only produces a so-called PDF/A-1b version which does not include tags and mark-ups and which is suitable for documents which are primarily image-based and do not have alternate text. The more complete PDF/A-1a version enables screen reader technology to correctly read the document to disabled persons; c) It seems that even if you have software that can convert to PDF/A format, it still only places the “PDF” extension at the end of the file name, thereby providing no explicit confirmation of whether the file has been converted successfully to PDF/A or whether a file is or is not PDF/A compliant.