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

[Tom Worthington]

At 09:43 AM 1/04/2007, Robert Hart wrote:
>... 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. ...

National Archives of Australia convert MS Office documents to ODF 
using OpenOffice. They then store both the MS Office original and the 
converted ODF versions, along with some metadata.

This is described in "How digital records are transferred to the 
Archives' digital repository" 
<http://naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/preservation/digital/digital_repository.html>.

You might want to take this approach, keeping both an MS Office and 
ODF version, and perhaps even use NAA's Xena open source software to 
do it <http://naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/preservation/digital/applications.html>.

>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. ...

See: "XML data formats", from National Archives of Australia, for a 
concise argument for using XML formats: 
<http://naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/preservation/digital/xml_data_formats.html>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml