At the AACRAO Technology Conference in July, Susan Reyes of San Diego State University Enrollment Services and Tuan Anh Do of San Francisco State University Enrollment Management Technology presented the basics of PDF transcripts. Employed more and more by institutions, the PDF, or Portable Document Format, was originally developed by Adobe Systems. It preserves most aspects of the source across applications, such as color and format, no matter what platform and hardware that was employed to create it. PDFs can be read in Adobe Acrobat Reader, provided free by Adobe Systems, as well as in many newer browsers using the appropriate plug-in. Since PDF Transcripts make it easy to deliver transcripts to other institutions and businesses, they are offered by a number of vendors. For security, considerations include watermarks and digital signatures. The ability to forward the transcript is restricted; and the length of time the transcript is viewed and available is limited. If there is a link to the transcript it is embedded, or the receiver is required to access a secure site.
Methods of transmission include email (which is fast but not very secure), SFTP or Secure File Transfer Protocol from one institution to another, and vendor networks (institutions that trade through a particular vendor) which includes usage of https protocol.
The institution must determine which methods to accept: it must look at its business processes and security environment and decide which method(s) and vendor(s) to work with. San Diego State, for example, works with any vendor the sending institution uses but only accepts transcripts they know has come from the sending institution. It does not accept direct email, since it can be intercepted and it is difficult to tell where it came from. At San Francisco State the PDF is part of the business process.
The PDF Transcript decreases costs and processing time for senders: it reduces the use of paper, the amount of printing, and mailing times. On the receiving end, however, PDF transcripts can printed for direct use, imaged and data input into an ECM solution or student information systems. Some systems can be configured to load the images in a programmatic fashion, but most often they must be manually processed using OCR technology.
For further exploration of PDFs and electronic transcript exchange, readers may be interested in accessing a webinar presented by the AACRAO SPEEDE Committee: Promoting The Understanding of Electronic Transcript Exchange.