National Archives of Australia Transitioning to OASIS OpenDocument Format

This has been foreshadowed for a while now, but there’s movement on the National Archives of Australia transitioning to the OASIS standard document format OpenDocument (used by OpenOffice.org amongst others).

It’s not clear whether this will merge with or replace their existing open source XML archive file format Xena and how it will interact with the way that documents are currently imported into the repository.

OK – after reading through some of their docs it appears that Xena uses OpenOffice.org to do some of the conversions between file formats, so my guess is that they’re considering saving their documents with OOo inside a Xena container (presumably in addition to the binary blob that contains the original document format).