In a piece from February in On The Media, Bob Garfield is interviewed about his piece on Slate.com about the National Archive ingestion policies. He makes the assertion that they are actually not able to ingest digital documents such as MS Word, and Powerpoint files.
“… the National Archives’ technology branch is so antiquated that it cannot process some of the most common software programs. Specifically, the study states, the archives “is still unable to accept Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint slides.”
I would like to think this is because those formats are proprietary and saving them actually has all kinds of sticky legal and versioning issues… But it does beg the question, if they are not ingesting Powerpoint and Word files, what are they ingesting?
