[LINK] Looking for some advice from the link 'brain'

[Robert Hart]

Hi

I have recently acquired (as a volunteer) IT management responsibility 
for the Gliding Federation of Australia - a largely volunteer run 
organisation that oversees the sport of gliding in Australia, but with a 
few interesting twists as it also exercises regulatory authority 
(delegated from CASA) for gliders (including those gliders with engines).

One of the issues I am confronting is long term document storage - both 
old, paper documents and more recent electronic versions. For two main 
reasons, we need to maintain a 'paper' trail for many documents: 
regulatory (subject to CASA audit) and historical. We are soon to start 
handling the old paper documents by carefully culling the essential 
paper records and scanning them (with off site backup). We will also 
retain the paper copies on site whilst the vast majority of 'old paper' 
will go to off site storage.

We then come to the issue of electronic document storage.

As with most organisations, the majority of documents created by the GFA 
are in a variety of MS Office 'doc' formats (we also have a significant 
minority as PDFs, some of which are duplications of the MS Office 
documents and a small number of spreadsheets in XLS format). So far, we 
have not had (as far as I can tell) an issue with not being able to 
'read' an old format document, but assuredly that is going to happen 
some time in the future and we need to set things up so that we can 
avoid this.

Given that our use of MS Office is not very sophisticated, it is my 
preferred intention at this point to switch from MS Office to 
OpenOffice.Org. I would not convert all the old docs to ODF, but only do 
so when there is a need to access them. There will be some 'training' 
issues involved in the switch, but in a small organisation I think we 
can handle that fairly simply in house.

I'd appreciate comments in this if anyone has them.

I'm also looking for a really good, concise (max 2 pages A4), 
non-technical  (i.e. management oriented) paper on why an open document 
format is a necessity to ensure that we can read old documents at some 
arbitrary point in the future. There are heaps of documents out there, 
but many are too long and many get involved in MS bashing (which I do 
not want to do). If anyone can point me at a document that might meet my 
needs I would be most grateful.

I'd be happy to talk about this off list with people to avoid cluttering 
the list.

-- 
Robert Hart                                  hartr at interweft.com.au
+61 (0)438 385 533                           http://www.hart.wattle.id.au