Brian, For repositories, digital preservation isn't about Word or PDF. We are in phase 2 of a full-scale JISC programme on managing research data, we have arts repositories, and repositories with educational materials, as well as open access repositories. Can I point you to what these repositories look like in terms of file format profiles:
Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue66/hitchcock-tarrant
If you are right about the prevalence of policies on pdf, then these are probably the same policies we saw when embarking on a preservation project 5 years ago. Today such policies may be a convenience for some repositories, but have little to do with preservation. Digital preservation has moved on enormously in that time, and that progress is embedded in tools that are available to all. If people are aware of some or all of these tools, perhaps they are less familiar with how they can be joined up in a structured repository preservation strategy. In which case, they may also be interested in a short, but fully documented, 5-part course we ran in 2011
http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/keepit/tag/keepit-course/
File formats were covered in parts 3 and 4 of this course, i.e. they are not the starting point for digital preservation.
Steve
On 25 Jul 2012, at 11:49, Brian Kelly wrote:
> I've always deposited an MS Word copy of my papers in my local repository, together with a PDF copy. I've done this because I've been told of the importance of preserving the master copy of a resource, rather than a lossy derivative version, such as PDF. As I've experience in having to recreate an MS Word file from a PDF copy I know this can be a cumbersome process. I assume some authors may prefer to deposit a PDF copy as this may be regarded as providing a form of DRM by making it slightly more difficult to process the file.
>
> What policies and practices do people have in place related to this? A Google search for "Policies on depositing MS Word files" suggests that PDFs are the norm. Since the MS Office format has been an ISO standard since 2007 I assume the proprietary versus open standard format for deposits argument is not as strong as it was (subject to caveats about support for ISO/IEC 29500 Strict
> and the arguments about the validity of the standardisation process which I don't want to go into).
>
> Thanks
>
> Brian
>
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> Brian Kelly
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