Dear Richard

I think I can see 2 issues coming from your response.

Firstly archiving, yes in an ideal world everyting we dealt with would
be in XML (or whatever is to come next!), however, we are an archive
often working with dated, legacy data that we are lucky if we have a
machine on which to read it. So our deposit guidelines reflect the world
as it is, not necessarily as we would like it to be. But yes, one of my
jobs in the next few months is to revise the whole of the Guidelines for
Depositors.

Secondly, another of our roles is to provide advice and guidance for
those creating digital resources (including text). In the series of
Guides to Good Practice , our advice on good practice in creating texts
can be found at (http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/documents/creating/chap5.html#0)
where, I hope you will be pleased to find a chapter on SGML/XML and TEI.

You asked what ODA was - Office Documentation Architecture devised by
the ISO - do we get the prize?

BW

Catherine




-----Original Message-----
From: The Forum for Information Standards in Heritage (FISH)
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Richard Light
Sent: 01 October 2003 10:32
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [FISH] FW: [FISH] E-thesis project: an invitation to
collaborate


In message <[log in to unmask]>, CS
Hardman <[log in to unmask]> writes
>Dear Richard,
>
>Many thanks for your email.  Yes indeed - the ADS provides a digital
>preservation service which is why we are making this offer and think it

>is worth while.  The files delivered online may not be the ones that we

>retain in deep storage.  Our ingest procedures including formats and
>documentation are described at:
>http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/policy.html

Catherine,

I am glad to see that ASCII and RTF are "preferred" for textual
resources over the binary word-processor formats you mentioned in your
announcement.  However, I do hope that your list of preferred and
acceptable formats is out of date, and doesn't reflect current practice.

I am very surprised to see that XML isn't even down as an "acceptable"
format - shouldn't it be your preferred option these days (e.g. TEI XML
would be a very smart choice to promote)?  This despite the fact the
SGML _is_ there - along with ODA, for heaven's sake.  (Could FISH offer
a small prize for anyone who remembers what "ODA" stands for?)

Richard

--
Richard Light
SGML/XML and Museum Information Consultancy [log in to unmask]