Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

As I said in my primary reply, we are in compliance with the Act, which, as the Deputy knows, is about preserving records for storage and subsequent release within the provisions of the Act. The Department is complying with that, according to my information.

The Department uses standard well-documented formats, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PDF and Lotus Notes for electronic documents and records. Whenever system or database upgrades are performed checks are carried out to ensure that existing electronic documents and records remain accessible. It is also standard practice in my Department to convert data in older formats to more up to date formats on an ongoing basis to preserve accessibility into the future. For example, older documents created in Lotus Word Pro are converted into Microsoft Word format and older spreadsheets created in Lotus 123 are converted into Microsoft Excel format. These are updated according as upgrades come on stream.

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