[Dspace-general] Supported Formats, PDF

[MacKenzie Smith]

Hi Jeremy,

MIT's format support policies are documented here 
http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-mit/build/policies/format.html
We did decide to "support" PDF since it's a publicly documented, if 
proprietary, specification, but I gather
that might have been a bit optimistic... the spec is so flexible that 
writing a PDF reader based on it doesn't
really guarantee that you can write a PDF reader that will render a given 
PDF successfully... so let's hope
that PDF/A catches on or that the automatic conversion tools do the trick.

I doubt if we'll change our policy since PDF is one of the most popular 
document formats in the world and it's
hard for me to believe that it might become obsolete without vendors 
stepping in to provide conversion tools...
entire governments and industries depend on PDF for their records 
compliance... but the conservative
choice would be to make PDF "known" and PDF/A "supported".

Have we had to test this? No, thankfully.

Most DSpace repositories have made their support policies publicly 
available via their DSpace websites...
if you look under "Help" "File Formats" in a given DSpace site you'll see 
the local decisions. For example,
the ANU policies that Scott provided are at 
http://dspace.anu.edu.au/help/formats.jsp#policy and the
University of Cambridge policies are here 
http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/help/formats.jsp#policy.
A lot of sites have kept the default settings (i.e. "known" rather than 
"supported"), but I hope that more
organizations will set their policies as they have the time...

MacKenzie Smith
MIT Libraries

At 03:41 PM 5/8/2006 -0700, Shellhase, Jeremy wrote:
>I had a few quick questions for anyone running a Dspace repository.
>1) Have you decided to declare Adobe PDF a "supported" format?
>1.a.) If you have, has anyone undertaken any "functional preservation" on
>this or actually any other format?
>1.b.) What was or will be the signal(s) that "functional preservation" is
>indicated for a particular format, like Adobe PDF