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

[Karl Auer]

On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 07:48 +1000, Tom Worthington wrote:
> National Archives of Australia convert MS Office documents to ODF 
> [...]
> 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[...]

Or not. You need to be very aware when archiving of *why* you are
archiving and *who you are archiving for*. These things then inform how
you do your archiving and what criteria it has to meet.

The NAA has a very clearly articulated set of rationales, and they are
almost certainly NOT useful (or largely not) for anyone else.

Just one example: They archive film to videotape, which means an
immediate loss of over 90% of the information contained on colour cinema
film. More if you count the information stored in soundtracks and in the
bearer itself (perforations, interframe gaps etc). They also archive
film by moving nitrate film to polyester film - which is a lossy,
analogue process and while polyester is longer-lived, it is by no means
immortal.

The NAA deliberately avoid conversions (they call them migrations),
again for very good reasons, but for reasons that are almost certainly
wrong from most other enterprises' point of view.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/                  +61-428-957160 (mob)