[Ecommerce] National Archives of Australia readies move to OpenDocument

[Manon Ress]

Thanks to Dave for pointer:

http://www.computerworld.com.au/pp.php?id=954149621&eid=-6787

National Archives readies move to OpenDocument
Howard Dahdah
31/03/2006 12:16:19

The Digital Preservation team at the National Archives is looking to
migrate its Xena preservation software to the new OpenDocument format
with the next release of the software, in turn being the first
Australian government agency to do so.

The National Archives has been involved in drafting the Open Document
Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) format, working closely
with the OASIS standards group in submitting code for the new file
format.

OpenDocument is a specification for standardizing documents based on
an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file format. It covers the
features required by text, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents.

Office and productivity suites such as Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes
and WordPerfect support proprietary document formats. Suites that
support OpenDocument include OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice and IBM
Workplace.

Michael Carden, preservation software manager at the National
Archives of Australia, said NAA is in the process of migrating its
office file preservation format to use the OpenOffice 2.0 suite which
by default uses OpenDocument.

Carden said his team at NAA was testing code at this minute and has
been submitting changes to the CVS repository on Sourceforge regularly.

"Testing is massive. We need to account for every permutation of any
file format. It is time-consuming," he said.

The NAA is interested in ODF because the nature of its work involves
receiving information in disparate file types from all over the country.

"We can't tell people 'we only accept this file format'. We have to
deal with whatever comes our way."

Because the bulk of the material received by NAA deals with office
productivity suites, converting it to an open format ensures the
longevity of the information. Carden said its paper documents, if
kept in perfect conditions should last well over 100 years. Digital
information should also be afforded that luxury, he said.

In the US a high profile OpenDocument case study is the State of
Massachusetts. In September of last year, Massachusetts' then CIO
Peter Quinn finalized a policy for state agencies to develop a
gradual plan for migration to OpenDocument, beginning January 1, 2007.


************************************************
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

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