A Public Record in a Common Language

A recent New York Times story about government document standards could have important ramifications, because it represents collaborative planning about information design and awareness that relying on proprietary corporate software for document production and preservation may endanger an increasingly electronic public record. Corporate strategies that emphasize planned obsolescence and competing platforms in cutthroat competition may be good for share-holders, but they are very bad for archivists. For example, the National Archives is supporting the Open Document format as an alternative to Microsoft Word.