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
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 One would think that by then they are outdated and no longer needed.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.
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.
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?
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.
