“Archives for Everyone” – it’s International Archives Week 2025!

The week 9-13 June 2025 is the 7th International Archives Week, with the theme of “#ArchivesAreAccessible – Archives for Everyone”. In support of this theme and its four subthemes, the PDF Association is pleased to announce its forthcoming Best Practice Guide on “Conforming to both PDF/A & PDF/UA”. This publication will be freely available from June 19, 2025.

The ability to create electronic PDF documents as records that are both appropriate for long-term preservation (i.e., conform to PDF/A, ISO 19005) and will remain fully accessible (i.e., conform to PDF/UA, ISO 14289) ensures that records in archives can truly support the broader community including users who require assistive technologies to navigate and read. Including Tagged PDF and logical structure capabilities in archival documents enhances the quality, discoverability, and accessibility of the record by improving semantic context and text extraction, benefiting all downstream users.

This new Best Practice Guide (BPG) will support both record managers and application software developers creating PDF export technologies, enabling them to understand the technical details of PDF documents that conform to both PDF/A and PDF/UA. The BPG includes 15 discrete advisory points, including reasoning and vital details.

When applying this guidance, record managers may need to refine their policies, ingestion procedures, or access and FOIA protocols to ensure that archival practices align with these recommendations.  Application software developers already familiar with exporting to PDF/A can adopt the PDF Association’s XMP Extension Schema templates to support the PDF/UA conformance metadata.

Information, resources, and other publications on Accessible PDF and Archival PDF can be found on the PDF Association’s website. In addition to ISO 32000, the core PDF specification, the PDF Association also makes PDF/UA-1 and PDF/UA-2 available at no cost.