Perusing the academic literature often results in delightful endeavors of others. Even if the work never directly overlaps with mine in instructional design and instruction, I can at least ponder it. It offers a brain tickle. A recent article addressed the issue of how one hardy band of academics would map between printed and digtal document instances.

The Role of Static Paper in a Document Life Cycle

In various design plans, paper has a role. While much paper has been digitized, there may well be some wood-pulp-based artifacts that are resistant to digitization because of size, complexity, intellectual property protections, or other reasons. (The article I read didn't go into the reasons per se.)

There have been endeavors - hard SCORM, digital pen annotations on paper - to create so-called "interactive paper."

The "use case" here then is when a paper artifact has to be linked to digital artifacts in terms of annotations and resources. The project then apparently relates to the capturing of descriptive metadata of both paper and digital artifacts and the interactions between these documents. This mediating state then maps between print and digital locations and may even track with digital documents in evolution.

My (limited) understanding is that this metadata link exists digitally, and the paper then is archived in some environmentally protective space, and the digital materials are archived on some database. The authors describe how they define the various levels of granularity of objects in the print and digital documents.

A Value-Added Bridge

I can imagine a complex tangle here. The usual mitigation in such situations is to rip through the print source and make digital equivalents of what is needed. I suppose that in hard-pressed time-based situations, digitizing these interrelationships between the paper and the digital may offer value-added.

There's the idea that such information may well be stored well into the future for various uses.

"The provision of a clear model for mapping between printed and digital document instances is the key to support a seamless transition between the paper and digital worlds within the document life cycle. The interplay between paper and digital document instances is achieved by defining a common component where physical and digital information is exchanged freely and where every physical object may always be paired with its digital source. The core model stores a combination of physical and digital information needed to map paper documents to the different kinds of possible digital sources, thereby dealing with all three kinds of documents and existing authoring tools, but being general enough to support other kinds of documents or authoring tools in the future," write Weibel, Norrie and Signer (Aug. 28 - 31, 2007, p. 20).

Indeed, the long-term uses would require absolute clarity in the annotations and metadata descriptions, which likely need to be written with strict guidelines.

Weibel, N., Norrie, M.C., and Signer, B. (2007, Aug. 28 - 31). A model for mapping between printed and digital document instances. DocEng '07. ACM. pp. 19 - 28.