National Archive File Format Time Bomb

geordie_loz writes "The BBC is reporting that the UK National Archive is warning of old formats being a 'ticking time-bomb' where data is going to be lost because of incompatibility in newer versions of software, and software not existing at all. More surprisingly, Microsoft has offered a solution via the OOXML format."

Comments

Re:Doesn't matter.

[Bazzargh]

And being a government, these files are INCREDIBLY important.

Why haven't they been converted? Really, all their DIGITAL archives should be in a single format by now.

No, they shouldn't. You usually want 3 formats:
- the original format of the document. Whatever whichever idiot happened to write (or record, or video) it in, you absolutely want the original in your records.
- a searchable format (eg OCR'd text from scanned image docs)
- a rendered format. (eg an image or pdf, or svg - something open enough that you can continue to show how the doc would have looked). The appropriate rendered format varies. Paper is not an appropriate format for storing CCTV footage, for example ;)

If you're very, very lucky the original is both searchable and viewable; like, say, HTML. It gets more complicated too, because you often want to store a redacted copy of the document (think of the Onion story 'CIA realise they've been using black highlighter pen all these years') and you want that searchable too, so you have to keep a redacted searchable format too... and of course, some of the records are on actual paper. Have you started worrying about the fading inks in the originals yet?

BTW you can't restrict the format of the original. Consider an email from a corporate bidding for a govt contract, with attachments. They need to keep those.

- Mr. E

PS, posting anon because I have dealings with the national archives, and don't want to speak for my company.