The UK National Archives (NA) has announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with MS. For those still who are old (like me) I should mention that NA used to be known as the Public Records Office, or colloquially, Kew, where it is based. It has the responsibility of preserving vast numbers of public documents. These used to be all paper (or maybe parchment, going further back) but increasingly they are digital. Natalie Ceeney, 
the youthful looking Chief Executive, claims that they have 580 terabytes of digital file formats which are no longer in use.
The MoU, which curiously does not seem to be available on the site, sets how MS will help the NA to preserve these documents. It will make available Virtual PC 2007, which allows a PC to switch between multiple operating systems with a single keystroke. That is not exactly munificent, since Virtual PC is free for anyone to download and is arguably not the best tool for the job (most people would use VMware). However, MS is presumably also making available a collection of old versions of Windows and Office (or maybe even their predecessors), which can be loaded onto NA’s PCs.
Anyway, it all seems fairly sensible.
What caught my eye was the comments by Adam Farquhar. The BBC notes that Ms Ceeney “said the issue of older file formats was a bigger problem than reading outdated forms of media …” and then turns to Adam: “He said: ‘MS has taken tremendous strides forward in addressing this problem. There has been a sea change in attitude.’ He warned that the issue of digital preservation did not just affect national archives and libraries. ‘It’s everybody - from small businesses to university research groups and authors and scientists. It’s a huge challenge for anyone who keeps digital information for more than 15 years because you are talking about five different technology generations.’ … He said that open file formats were an important step but there was still work to be done. ‘Automation is a key area to work on. We need to be able to convert hundreds and even thousands of documents at a time’ ”
So our public service broadcaster is carrying a nice little plug for MS and (indirectly) OpenXML, courtesy of Adam Farquhar. I cannot entirely blame them, why would they know that he had chosen to adopt the role of Ambassador Extraordinary for Microsoft?
Just pause to examine what Adam said. The National Archives’ announcement, and the whole of the rest of the BBC article, was about the NA’s chosen approach of running the old software to view the old files. OpenXML is completely unnecessary for that approach. The NA approach would work even if MS had decided to stick with closed binary formats.
Evidently Adam thinks the NA has a great approach. So why is he running round telling everyone that OpenXML has to be made an ISO/IEC standard?
He is clearly wrong in the quote above saying that “everybody” is affected. Well they may be affected but only trivially. Hard to read office document formats are a far smaller problem for business than for governments, and they are only a significant problem for small parts of government like the NA. In 99% of cases, probably more, a paper copy or a .pdf copy are all that the business needs. Of course, the .pdf copy may not be perfect, the pagination may be slightly different, occasionally other things will be a little wonky, but it is exceedingly rare that a business needs perfect fidelity. Of course, one can no doubt point to a particular court case or whatever, where it does matter. Or one can find a bizarre case where someone actually wants to mess around executing macros in a ten year old spreadsheet. But such cases can easily be dealt with on an ad hoc basis.
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