E-discovery seminar and downloadable presentations

I attended a very interesting e-discovery seminar just over a week ago in Washington DC, organised by GTSI and with an excellent set of speakers. Metadata and archive formats (ODF and PDF/a are key archival formats) were mentioned frequently.

The presentations are all available at this page.

When does open mean shut - follow on

It is all covered in this BBC news article from today.

When does open mean shut?

Interesting story on the BBC on Tuesday about Microsoft working with the UK National Archives to ensure documents can be read in the future. I’ve posted on this problem before, but Microsoft’s move to promote its Open XML file format is really getting some attention.

From the BBC story, it seems that Microsoft is admirably helping out the National Archives with virtualisation technology to help it read old documents. Microsoft is then hoping to use the halo of this good deed to persuade everyone that it’s got our best interests at heart by pushing its own Open XML “standard” as a rival to the Open Document Format (ODF). I’m less than convinced, as are many others. What do you think?

Office 2007 causing problems

Charles Arthur at the Guardian has written an interesting article about problems with Microsoft’s new Office 2007 document formats. As they’re not backwards compatible with previous Word formats, Microsoft’s had to put out converters for older versions of Office to read them, and the consensus seems to be it’s made a mess of the problem.

It’s not just the short-term problems that are concerning – what’s going to happen to those billions of old Word documents? Are we going to be able to read them in 10, 20 or 50 years time? I’m sure I’m not the only one old enough to remember the BBC Domesday project from 1986, and the scare when its data was nearly lost. OK, the Domesday project was more about obsolete hardware than non-standard file formats, but the point is the same. Maybe we should put everything in PDF now and cross our fingers?