The ODF Era: Why South Africa's Long‑Term Records Preservation Still Rests on PDF/A

28 October 2026

Nearly two decades since South Africa adopted OpenDocument Format (ODF) as a government standard, the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa (NARSSA) has yet to formally designate it as a preferred format for long‑term preservation. Instead, PDF/A and related SANS (ISO) standards continue to anchor NARSSA's approach to records management and accessibility.

This stance represents a deliberate application of internationally recognised specifications to address the inherent pressures of digital preservation, rather than an outright rebuke of ODF's proponents. NARSSA's own guidance specifically highlights the precarious nature of file format lifecycle and the intrinsically broad nature of long‑term electronic recordkeeping requirements.

OpenDocument Format for Government Office Work

The story of ODF in South Africa begins on 24 October 2007, when the government updated its Minimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems in government (MIOS). This moment marked a significant policy intervention, as the MIOS v4.1 added an explicit definition of open standards and included the recently minted ISO OpenDocument Format as one of three “working office document formats” alongside UTF‑8/ASCII text and CSV.

The MOIS update arose amid a broader global movement to adopt open standards in government, with South Africa quickly becoming a leader in Africa. That December, Computerworld noted South Africa's bold move to require ODF for document exchange between government agencies and with the public. While a 2007 interview with South African government official Arno Webb laid out a phased plan for ODF adoption, with full internal government document creation in ODF targeted for March 2009, government as a whole has not published a definitive account of its success in meeting that fast‑moving rollout timeline.

A key factor driving ODF's adoption in Office of the State may be competitive - the specification allows South Africa to avoid reliance on incompatible proprietary office suites from foreign vendors. Yet even as ODF's open-source ethos continues to echo in declarations such as the South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science describing it as the “safest” format for guaranteed long‑term availability, the evidence suggests that this policy attitude has not yet been enough to translate into a national archival standard.

The Broadcast and Page-Decoration Flaws

NARSSA's specific, evidence-based electronic records management criteria do not overlook the issues of digital preservation and format obsolescence, even if they do not yet demarcate a comprehensive ODF playbook. The archives service's table stakes for integrated systems clearly show that any solution must master functional file plans, record versioning, and audit trails, among other concerns—in fact, NARSSA specifies 21 minimum system deliverables in its 2006 policy on managing electronic records.

When it comes to document format choices in particular, NARSSA has always recognized that no solution is universally “best,” and that a variety of factors including propagation, legibility, and rendering play into determining a symbol into pictograph into a perfect archival constellation—perhaps including, often including, ODF. The 2009 expression of NARSSA's electronic records policy guidance, for example, acknowledged the long-term unavailability of proprietary formats and discussed PDF and XML as two of a set of promising options. But it also cautioned that digital immersion doesn't guarantee longevity.

The testing bedrock comes, in fact, not from ODF, but a format that keeps the publication standards close to the text: PDF, or technically its more permanent version, PDF/A, for which a 2006 NARSSA policy document designated SANS 19005‑1:2006 (parallel to PDF/A-1) as an official standard. Coupled with a SANS 19005‑2 for PDF/A-2 published in 2011, this sets ground rules for a paper-like digital system characterised by consistency over time. The same paper goes on to lay out migration as a key strategy for ensuring the longevity of digital records, a system that is naturally compatible with a layered use of formats from PDF/A to ODF.

It is this kind of agile, adaptable approach - one that brings together many stakeholders, holds it all together, as a dynamic whole - that outlines the broad next steps for NARSSA's approach. Metadata management, for example, is another critical area where the archives agency is continuing to build regulatory and policy muscle, as indicated by its recent digital records metadata publication. There, the agency underscores the need for “a globally recognised, open and freely available data exchange format for the interoperability of information” while also introducing concepts like “physical application format” and “presentation format” in its metadata definitions, suggesting a recognition of nuanced format decisions at play. In 2019, NARSSA also published guidelines illustrating the lifecycle of digital records, a crucial proxy for long-term preservation and access.

PDF/A, its intersection of government processes and formats with a slow-motion perspective, may seem like a obvious solution for resisting change, digital obsolescence, and the siren song of balkanised foreign software and that is of course true. But it is also a functional reply to the evolutionary nature of digital preservation, which carries within it the ability to include a host of formats, including ODF, as they are built out to fit the known facts.