What can go into the National Archives?

June 11th, 02009 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander

 

In a piece from February in On The Media,  Bob Garfield is interviewed about his piece on Slate.com about the National Archive ingestion policies.  He makes the assertion that they are actually not able to injest digital documents such as MS Word, and Powerpoint files.

“… the National Archives’ technology branch is so antiquated that it cannot process some of the most common software programs. Specifically, the study states, the archives “is still unable to accept Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint slides.”

I would like to think this is because those formats are proprietary and saving them actually has all kinds of sticky legal and versioning issues… But it does beg the question, if they are not ingesting Powerpoint and Word files, what are they ingesting?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 02009 at 10:56 am and is filed under Digital Dark Age.

  • Bryan Campen

    Most disconcerting about this piece was learning how little of the record from either gulf war (Desert Shield or Iraqi Freedom) is archived, and when you compare that to tracing the history of the Viet Nam war it is truly astounding how little access we have to our recent past. The memos, letters, orders, transcripts and minutes of meetings from secretaries tto generals and White House advisors which comprise the backbone of any worthwhile history of a conflict are not, since at least the nineties, in those archives because of this one simple problem.

  • http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/biweekly-links-for-07062009/ Michael Nielsen » Biweekly links for 07/06/2009

    [...] The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » What can go into the National Archives? [...]

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