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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
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People want the government to provide services efficiently yet the second anyone suggests not doing things the most expensive and outdated way possible everyone loses their minds.
Are you all accelerationists or just the no give only throw dog?
This isn’t about efficiency - if they were just digitizing it that would be fine. Getting rid of the originals in addition is a recipe for disaster
Maintaining and keeping 500 million paper documents is expensive. If they just let them sit neglected for cheaper, then they may risk confidentiality. So they have to either properly actively maintain and secure them, or destroy them for risk of some breach of confidentiality.
Further, I don’t understand what this “disaster” would look like.
“maintaining” paper documents is a new one to me.
It’s my understanding, the less you disturb them, the longer they last.
You have to maintain a rather large facility to care for 500 million paper documents, while keeping them organized and accessible.
You have to maintain low humidity, prevent pests like insects and rodents, and maintain vigilance against things like fire, roof leaks, and break ins.
Something like this. But seriously, this is how GilBates1!!1 becomes the newest billionaire.
For archival, I think things are less controversial. No one is going to modify a will executed 100 years ago and the world will say “goly gee, we missed that, we will now take from the proper heirs and give to you”.
For one, it’s a closed matter even if they legitimately failed to execute on the old will.
For another, if it somehow did matter, they’d probably validate the authenticity of the digital copy at least against some air gapped signature, if not going to restore the actual document from offline.
For the voting example, I think people think too highly of the paper system. Corrupt voting infrastructure can have stuffed ballots ready to go and enough non voting registered voters to back up their ballots beyond the reasonable extent an audit would ever go. Paper votes have often been corrupted. Most we ever do is recount, and if the ballots were stuffed, this would do nothing.
I present to you, somebody who hasn’t read the article.
Personally I’d rather just not cut government funding to the bone and force them to to do things like this and sacrificing long term archiving on the altar of efficiency.
Isn’t 4.5 million pounds just the tea and biscuit budget for parliament?
They want to destroy historical documents to save a rounding error in the government budget?
Let one of big wealthy universities look after the historically significant ones. That should save a bunch of money right there.
Man some hackers gonna be raking in the inheritance of their extremely large family.
What the article doesn’t reveal is how they want to digitise this stuff and where it’ll be stored. Will it be on IPFS? On a blockchain? A public cloud like AWS where the bill might jump unexpectly to more than 4.5M pounds a year?
It might be an OK idea, but it feels like this will be horribly bungled.
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If you mean it’s not technically possible, then you’re wrong How to Store Data in Blockchain?.
If you mean it shouldn’t be done, then I don’t really have an opinion on that.
The answer seems simple. Digitise the wills and any of historical value as identified by an independent body made up of Twitter historians can keep the originals for prosperity and research 😂.
Digitise the lot and start with new wills. I understand the value to historians of keeping old pieces of paper but at some point the costs of that have to be evaluated against the benefits. You can’t just say “it’s of an unquantifiable amount therefore we need to keep them”, that’s such a lazy cop out.
In fact I’m increasingly frustrated that all legal documents aren’t digitised. Shuffling paper around is so backwards and a nightmare to search and index efficiently.
What can it even cost, at a ceiling? A few hundred thousand a year? I million? Even a hundred million? I expect it’s way less, but even if it’s half a billion, that is pocket change in the first world. If your government can’t afford to write off an expense that miniscule, you live in a failed state.
So you’re saying that governments should waste tax payer money on something that has no real benefit just because it can?
I guess you also want to keep them longer than 150 years?;I mean it would be crack head behaviour to throw them out right? Why not convert the whole country to warehouses and store every document ever made?
They’re just old legal documents, interesting to have a copy for future generations but in no way worth the huge waste of money storing them would be.
So you’re saying that governments should waste tax payer money
Stopped reading there.
No. I’m saying what was in my comment. The right interpretation for what I say is the one I already gave you.
Are you talking about the cost of digitising? Or the cost of keeping paper records?
Because there’s more to this than simply how expensive is the format that we keep them in. There’s also how quick and easy it is to produce, to search, to share, to update. These are all positives when information is digitised that can’t be done if your will is a piece of paper forgotton underneath your bed.
The cost of keeping paper records. Doing anything but keeping them is crackhead behavior, it’s like ripping copper pipes out of your walls and selling them to keep your electricity turned on. A society has failed if it reaches that point. I agree there’s more to it than expense, such as having a secured original that’s much more difficult to forge.
Doing anything but keeping them is crackhead behavior, it’s like ripping copper pipes out of your walls and selling them to keep your electricity turned on. A society has failed if it reaches that point.
I’m sorry but this wildly over simplifying the issue to the point that the copper pipe analogy and hyperbolic language isn’t useful. I respectfully hard disagree with this characterisation for the reasons I’ve explained in my other reply.
Putting a will (or anything other legal documents) on paper must have seemed totally natural hundreds of years ago but at some point we need to accept that we have different needs for these documents and different ways of capturing them.
I totally agree with you about security. That should be a principle in all of this. But that shouldn’t constrain us to recording on paper. If security is paramount then design a system whereby you can verify the veracity and authenticity of the digital document and create secured controls around their handling - hint these systems already exist today. Tampering and theft is certainly an issue but realistically so is it if you still had paper. It’s not uncommon for paper to burn, I have been told 😉.
Any system is fallible, but that shouldn’t mean we remove it from consideration.
But that shouldn’t constrain us to recording on paper.
If you’re going to argue with me, spend less time on smug pontification and more time making sure you actually know what my point is.
I’m not trying to argue with you 😔. I’m trying to have a conversation with you. There’s no need to be like that.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But Tom Holland, the classical and medieval historian and co-host of The Rest is History podcast, said the proposal to empty shelves at the Birmingham archive was “obviously insane”.
Ministers believe digitisation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X to decry it as “bananas” and “a seriously bad idea”.
The proposal comes amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitised documents unavailable to users since late October.
He said the idea that officials can choose which wills to keep because, in the words of the MoJ, they “belong to notable individuals or have significant historical interest”, is “the typical arrogance of bureaucracy”.
He cited the example of Mary Seacole, the Jamiacan nurse who helped British soldiers during the Crimean war in the 1850s, whose story has been revived in recent years.
Digitalisation allows us to move with the times and save the taxpayer valuable money, while preserving paper copies of noteworthy wills which hold historical importance.”
The original article contains 883 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I mean you could do it with a otc tape library, a SAN, and a relatively inexpensive offsite tape agreement. You’d spend a couple mil setting it up. But tape, disk and support wouldn’t be unreasonable moving forward.
I understand why it is not a good idea to digitize, as tampering might be easier to do without any traces, but why do they store wills for 150 years? One would think that by then they are outdated and no longer needed.
Edit: looks like the concern is about historical artifacts. Feels even more ridiculous than I thought. What’s next, taking pictures of historical paintings and destroying originals? Why not digitize and still keep the originals?
Why not digitize and still keep the originals?
That’s where I’m at. Why not both? Redundancy is good,
Paper copies are good to have till they’re no longer necessary (edit: and apparently these aren’t necessary anymore)
Digital copies are also useful for obvious reasons
Storing a lot of valuable paper is expensive.
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.
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.
Not just me. There’s plenty of academic research on the subject. Here’s the Library of Congress’ preferred format for preservation of all types of documents. https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/index.html
I’m totally willing to bet any pdf will be unreadable in 1000 years. Low-acid paper, not only possible, but likely.
