[odf-discuss] Re: odf in schools

[Mike Carden]

On 8/15/07, marbux <marbux at gmail.com> wrote:
> There is also the Australian National Archives, which is heavily committed
> to ODF.

Sorry to inject a note of pedantry, but...

1. We're the National Archives of Australia, not the Australian
National Archives. I know, I know, People's Front of Judea vs the
Judean Peoples' Front. </montypython>

2. It continually bamboozles me that people around the world think
that we've 'heavily committed' to ODF. I think our self-promotion has
gone horribly wrong.

See, we have this software. It's called Xena. It works out what format
stuff is in and transforms it into an equivalent open format. If stuff
is in a Microsoft binary format, we turn it into ODF. That's all.

So, apart from a handful of developer desktops, the NAA is a 110%
Microsoft Office shop with nary a hint of ODF.

As for our current holdings of Australian Commonwealth government
records transformed from MS Office formats to ODF, the total is zero.
Zilch. Nada. None.

Turns out that so far, office docs are a vanishingly small proportion
of what's regarded important enough to live in our digital repository.
So we don't have any. We probably will some day, but possibly not for
a few years.

So our 'heavy commitment' to ODF is the fact the *one* of the dozen or
so plugins for Xena makes use of it. We haven't even done any real
work in it other than to write some XML elements and attributes for
our metadata to mention what ODF is.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of ODF and would love to see it more
widely adopted, but it pains me for the NAA to be a poster child for
it when we just aren't.

Sorry to be a bubble burster, but there you are.

Cheers,

Michael Carden
Technical Manager
Digital Preservation
National Archives of Australia