Jan NCC AIIM meeting: Stephen Levenson, Administrative Office of the US Courts talks about PDF/A

Thursday, January 15, 2009
Dinner Event
Westin Arlington Gateway

PDF/A What is it and why do I want it? Get an update on the First International Conference for PDF/A held in Europe last year! You can come learn how PDF/A is being used throughout government and industry, how to lower costs, and how to exchange content. Stephen Levenson who is the international convener for this standard and Chair of the AIIM Standards Board will discuss this standard and how it fits into other standards under development through AIIM. This presentation should interest practitioners of records management, CIOs’ and General Counsels of organizations.

We will also explore:

* What is PDF/A
* Why do I want or need it?
* When does document preservation start?
* How to keep long term costs under control.
* How does this fit into and effect ECM program.

About our speaker:

Stephen Levenson is the IT Specialist for Policy and Planning for the Administrative Office of the US Courts in Washington, DC.

FOIA, torture, and records management

Judge Gives Government 10 Days to Avoid Contempt on CIA Tapes

But the judge, the Southern District of New York's Alvin Hellerstein, said at a hearing that he would give the government 10 days to produce a declaration to convince him why he should refrain from a contempt finding and from ordering production of a list of the tapes, information on witnesses and any documents or memoranda relevant to the Freedom of Information Act request of the American Civil Liberties Union.

So now the CIA must produce a list of evidence that it destroyed. How does an administrator produce such a list. Imagine the buck passing going on right now within the agency, for those who destroyed the evidence are keen to arrange that someone else be responsible for describing that which was destroyed, leaving that individual or individuals on the hook for any contempt citation.

All the worker bees within the agency and their contractors are going to play this by the book, let the big shots go to jail.

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure New Rule 34(b)(ii)

To Metadata or Not to Metadata?

The new federal rules do not specifically address an important aspect of the e-discovery battlefield, though: what to do about "metadata," the "data about data" that is part of every electronically stored document or file that, typically, went unnoticed in the age when producing hard copy documents was the norm. So when must metadata be produced? Recent case law illustrates that the new rules do not address the question directly.

I would be interested in hearing from techies in the civil service and the contracting community as to what they think about this.

I would suggest to my fellow flacks that records management and document management are very much a PR issue.