[El Gato]

The only rationale I can think of for the current practice is that it hides irrelevant details and thus improves privacy. Of course, by keeping supporting details hidden, it also fuels doubt.

Originally and possibly still, the "short form" process made sense. It was even done when the short form *information* was saved on written logs. It's much cheaper in terms of storage space, physical or computer memory (tape, disk, even punched cards) to just save the information, in character format, than an image of the whole thing. Microfilm/microfiche might change that, since it takes up so little space. But finding a single long form, on film or paper, takes time, and more time is required to move that image to paper. If all you have is the "abstract" data in a database, it takes up much less storage, and could be "on line", that is on disk or other media that is always available, rather than tape. But now memory, especially mass storage, is cheap and compact. So it now become possible to store the images, which take *much* more space. (There would be an intermediate possition, which would have all the information, except the signatures, from the Long form "on line) and and a printout made of that upon request, just as the current abstract (Short form) is printed. But if, as they indicated, the long forms are stored as images, there is no real advantage to the short form, in terms of accessibility and labor required to access and print it. It merely reqires much more mass storage memory.

[cynwoody]

Originally and possibly still, the "short form" process made sense. It was even done when the short form *information* was saved on written logs. It's much cheaper in terms of storage space, physical or computer memory (tape, disk, even punched cards) to just save the information, in character format, than an image of the whole thing.

My impression is that giving out abstracts is a recent development and has taken place after the technology to store and retrieve digital images became available. In the old days, they'd fetch the paper out of a physical file, photostat it, sign it, stamp it, and mail it. A totally manual process, except for the photocopying step.

As early as the seventies, the technology to store an online database of abstracts existed. Images would have been out of the question, of course. But it would have been easy for a minicomputer of the day to retrieve an abstract out of an index-sequential file and print a certificate identical to the modern Hawaiian short form, albeit probably dot-matrix or line-printer, not laser.

So, it's strange that they should be reverting to abstracts even as digital image storage is now trivially available.