Ministry of Justice plan to destroy historical wills is ‘insane’, say experts
www.theguardian.com
Department hopes to save £4.5m a year by digitising – then binning – about 100m wills that date back 150 years

UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals “insane” say experts::Department hopes to save £4.5m a year by digitising – then binning – about 100m wills that date back 150 years

    • RainfallSonata@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      11 months ago

      Much less expensive than maintaining the digital format they’re scanned into over hundreds of years, or upgrading the format each time the technology evolves. Eventually you reach a point where it’s better to re-scan into the new format rather try to upgrade for the 50th time. But then you haven’t maintained the originals. Under the right conditions, paper can last thousands of years.

      • testfactor@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        11 months ago

        Wait, hold on. Are you arguing that, in the long run, it’s cheaper to pay rent and maintenance on facilities and personnel to caretake reams of paper than to have a bunch of PDFs on Google Drive?

        Paper isn’t some magical substance that doesn’t need any maintenance ever. Silverfish, fire, water, and a million other things need to be actively guarded against to keep these records usable.

        On the other hand, PDF has been around since 1992, and it hardly seems to be going anywhere. And even if it does, running a “PDF to NewStandard” converter on the files every 30 years or so seems unlikely to cost as much as 30yrs of rent on a physical building. And that holds true even over the course of 1000yrs. Rent’s not cheap, and neither are people who maintain physical records.

        Like, I’m not advocating for destroying the physical documents, but the idea that it’s even remotely close to being cheaper to keep them as paper vs digitizing is an absolute fantasy.