UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts
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
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 One would think that by then they are outdated and no longer needed.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
This is an idea straight out of science fiction that was meant to be a warning, not a guide. From "Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinge.
Tiny flecks of white floated and swirled in the column of light. Snowflakes? But one landed on his hand: a fleck of paper. And now the ripping buzz of the saw was still louder, and there was also the sound of a giant vacuum cleaner...
Brrrap! A tree shredder!
Ahead of him, everything was empty bookcases, skeletons. Robert went to the end of the aisle and walked toward the noise. The air was a fog of floating paper dust. In the fourth aisle, the space between the bookcases was filled with a pulsing fabric tube. The monster worm was brightly lit from within. At the other end, almost twenty feet away, was the worm's maw - the source of the noise... The raging maw was a "Navicloud custom debinder." The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel..." The shredded fragments of books and magazines flew down the tunnel like leaves in a tornado, twisting and tumbling. The inside of the fabric was stiched with thousands of tiny cameras. The shreds were being photographed again and again, from every angle and orientation, till finally the torn leaves dropped into a bin just in front of Robert.
Digitising wills: ok, cool.
Destroying paper originals: Oh god no, why?!
Presumably because they're confidential and therefore need to be disposed of properly and storing them costs money?
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.
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.
It's not insane, it's malicious. Done with ill intent. How many times do we have to see shit like this before we stop giving obvious evil the benefit of the doubt?
Saving money for the tax payer by doing things a better way is evil?
They have good form in spectacularly fucking this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
Man some hackers gonna be raking in the inheritance of their extremely large family.
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.
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.
If I care about data never being altered without permission then paper wins over digital, no contest. Paper is not immune to forgery but you can't automate breaking into millions of physical buildings to target certain individuals or mass destroy the documents.
That is why countries using electronic voting machines over paper should be considered an act of the poor, ignorance or corruption.
A government curated paper copy is hardly any more impervious to tampering than a digital copy.
If a government were so inclined, they could produce a paper resembling the original easily, just as they could a digital copy.
Now you could make an argument for digital records to require an air gapped archive as well, if you fear a fully online copy could be compromised by a non government or foreign government entity, but that's not paper v. Digital, that's online versus offline storage.
Note I was recently dealing with the estate of someone who died, and we had what we thought was the most canonical hard copy of the will, but the court rejected it as a duplicate and said the will was invalid unless we found a true original. Fortunately the will was within what we could legally do without the will (but with more work), but suffice to say a government digital record of the will would have worked better than any hard copy that we actually had.
It's far easier and cheaper to maintain old paper than it is to maintain the technology that stores the digitized paper, especially over a hundred or more years. Every time technology evolves you've got to reformat your digital file, and that gets harder the further it evolves. Eventually you reach a point where you just need to re-scan into a new format, but you can't if you've destroyed your original.
But the counter to this is that when it is digitised it becomes far easier to search, to share, and learn from. So there's that too.
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.
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.
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.
Did they learn nothing from Doctor Who?
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!
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.
You don't store stuff on a blockchain...
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.
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.