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
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the government to provide services efficiently yet the second anyone suggests not doing things the most expensive and outdated way possible everyone loses their minds.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.
Something like this. But seriously, this is how GilBates1!!1 becomes the newest billionaire.
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.
I present to you, somebody who hasn’t read the article.
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They want to destroy historical documents to save a rounding error in the government budget?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.
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!
