Best Preservation and Access files for PPT with audio and gif files, and presenter notes.

[victori...@stonybrook.edu]

Hello fellow digital curators,

I am working on an ongoing digital collection where PowerPoint files are sent to me regularly for preservation and access. The first batch contained text, images, and presenter notes. I saved them as PDFs and PDF/A files (please feel free to advise me against doing that). The current batch contain embedded gif and audio files as well. The trickiest part of this for me is the access file although after receiving some advice I thought to make accessible a PowerPoint Slideshow copy that is read-only. What I don't like about this is that it requires the user to have some PowerPoint experience, in my opinion, to navigate the presenter mode and slideshow mode. For the preservation copy it was advised to preserve the original PPT file. What other preservation files can you suggest in addition to this? 

Thank you for your time and expertise! 

Victoria

[Michael Kjörling]

On 12 Jan 2017 13:01 -0800, from victori...@stonybrook.edu:

> For the preservation copy it was advised to preserve the original PPT
> file. What other preservation files can you suggest in addition to this?

This might not be exactly what you are asking for, but one thing that
strikes me is that for full fidelity, you should be preserving the
fonts used in the presentation as well. Without those, at best, it
will potentially look different but the content will be the same; at
worst, some (for some languages or types of contents, possibly many)
glyphs may be unavailable.

It's possible that particularly the PDF/A copies are sufficient for
that use case, but it's also possible that they are not. Either way,
it should be a thought-through decision rather than happenstance.

--
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • mic...@kjorling.se
“People who think they know everything really annoy
those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)

[victori...@stonybrook.edu]

Thanks, Michael. I will certainly take font preservation into consideration. Fonts are already presenting an issue.

-Victoria Pilato