[odf-discuss] Re: odf in schools

[marbux]

Thanks for the clarification, Mike. I'll be appropriately cautious with what
I say about NAA next time around. :-)

Best regards,

Marbux

On 8/14/07, Mike Carden <mike.carden at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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>
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