Governments have tremendous amounts of records that have to be stored forever, searched frequently and often are unique. Many resorted to microfilm to make backups, but this technology is becoming obsolete and is not  easy to search.

PDF offers the chance to take the paper documents, microfilm and current electronic files into an easily searchable format. With the advent of PDF-A the documents will be usable for the next 50 years. Minutes, ordinances, drawings, parking tickets, maps and permitting forms are examples of the many items that can be stored and retrieved in an intelligent manner. This has eliminated the time searching for documents.

The United States is going back to the moon. Most of the people working on the project are either deceased or retired. Tremendous lessons learned from previous missions were locked in paper documents in the archives at Marshall Space Flight Center. Tom Carson digitized over 41,000 pages of the documents at Marshall making them searchable. The project was a success and Marshall has converted all the documents into searchable PDF format.

Governments have legal duty to review and approve new developments in their jurisdictions. This has historically involved routing numerous sets of drawings and specifications. This has been replaced by electronic PDF plan review at some of our clients. This has reduced review time and the reviewed plans are ready for archival. The governments are scanning their old paper drawings and adding them to the digital archive. .