There was a piece on the mid-morning Derek Davis show on RTE1 on Wednesday, 11 July about digital preservation. OOXML was not mentioned but this was clearly the backdrop to the discussion because the lead-in to the story was the British Library/UK National Archives (TNA) "digital dark age" story from last week.
You can listen here, it starts at 1 hr 27 mins http://rte.ie/radio1/todaywithderekdavis/
Teresa -----
Two people from the Irish National Archives were interviewed along with Nick McGrath, Microsoft Director of Platform Development.
The two archivists welcomed the MS/TNA initiative and said it was encouraging that one software developer was attempting to meet the challanges in cooperation with public archives. They were resassured by the MS arrangement with TNA. One archivist pointed out that MS was not the only software used in the Irish public service.
Nick McGrath explained that MS were offering TNA two different approaches to fixing the digital dark age problem.
1. They were enabling translation of documents from the older versions to bring them up to latest file formats. TNA have a comprehensive search and retrieval system that achieves this very purpose.
2. When people look at the documents, they may want to look at them in the format and application which they were originally created in. MS has been providing applications like Word, Excel, etc. for 20+ years. They decided to go back into their archives within MS and to collect old versions e.g. win3.1, office 4.2, and to create a "virtual pc" environment for every single older version. Now TNA have 2 different ways of retaining the information.
They can either convert it to the latest versions of MS products which now comform to open standards, or they can allow the person to view in the original application, old versions of MS products.
The presenter asked about the point made by the archivist, that many other computer systems are used beyond MS and does the system accomodate the work of other producers.
McGrath responded that 15 years ago the market place was very fragmented. This meant that MS had to have incredibly good interoperability or translators to the other packages that were available e.g. Lotus 123, WordPerfect or WordStar.
Now TNA have got old verions of MS Word which correspondingly allow them to open up those other older legacy products as well. So it doesn't just protect them on the MS format themselves, but it also protects them for the competitor formats that were in the marketplace 10-15 years ago.
The presenter asked that if you use this system, are you no longer under control of MS, that you no longer have to get at the stuff through MS if you get the system.
McGrath said yes. MS has listened to archivists around the world, and has engaged with the PLANETS consortium of European national archives [http://www.planets-project.eu/]. In response to their feedback and that of public sector organsations and customers, MS has now opened up their file formats in the latest version of Office 2007. This means that any document that is created in those formats is created in open standard i.e. it is fully documented. Archivists in 100 or 1000 years have all the documentation that will explain exactly how to open up that file and how to preserve that data.