open formats

Open Office as a document migration on demand tool- again

13 February, 2009

We’ve seen suggestions in comments on this blog, and on other blogs, that code is better than specifications as representation information, and that well-used, running open source code is better than proprietary code.

Email discussion on the usefulness of file format specifications

6 January, 2009

This is a summary of an email exchange on the DCC Associates email list over a few days in late November, early December. I thought it was revealing of attitudes to preservation formats and to representation information (in the form of both specifications and running code), so I’ve summarised it here. Emails lists are great for promoting discussion, but threads tend to fracture off in various directions, so a summary can be useful. Quotes are reproduced with permission; my thanks to all those involved.

Responses to RAW versus TIFF: image-related

1 July, 2008

This post summarises image-related responses to the “RAW versus TIFF” post made originally by Dave Thompson of the Wellcome Library. The key elements of Dave’s post were whether we should be archiving images using RAW (which contained more camera and exposure-related data) or TIFF (which was more standardized, likely to be accessible for longer, and had more available utilities). A subsidiary question on whether we should archive both is greatly affected by cost; responses related to this element are summarized in a separate post.

Migration on Request: OpenOffice as a platform?

20 March, 2008

Following on from my previous post relating to legacy formats, I was thinking again about the problems of dealing with documents in those formats. For some, the answer lies in emulation and perpetual licences of those original software packages, but for me that just doesn't cut the mustard. I won't have access to those packages, but I might want access to the documents.

Legacy document formats

20 March, 2008

On the O'Reill XML blog, which I always read with interest (particularly in relation to the shenanigins over OOXML and ODF standardisation), Rick Jelliffe writes An Open Letter to Microsoft, IBM/Lotus, Corel and others on Lodging Old File Formats with ISO. He points out that

The National Archives and Microsoft join forces...

17 July, 2007

On 4 July, The National Archives and Microsoft announced a Memorandum of Understanding "ensuring preservation of the nation´s digital records from the past, present and into the future".