UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts : technology

[–] takeda@lemmy.world 66 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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 One would think that by then they are outdated and no longer needed.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

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 39 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

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

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They aren't necessary, that's the point.

They want to preserve them as historical documents and the government is trying to cut storage costs.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh

Well in that case I'm a lot more meh about this. Thanks!

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 4 points 10 months ago

Yeah I'm not a historian so I'm not sure the value of keeping the originals.

[–] XTL@sopuli.xyz 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Storing a lot of valuable paper is expensive.

[–] RainfallSonata@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.world 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] YoorWeb@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Adobe Flash entered the chat.

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

Ah, yes, flash. A program that only lasted 15 years and was a platform that could execute arbitrary applications, most of which were silly video games.

A total apples to apples comparison with an open standard format for rendering static documents with hundreds of different reader implementations that's been around for a third of a century and is used by every major world government as the core standard for electronic documents. :P

[–] RainfallSonata@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

I don't think you've read your own source right. As far as I can tell that doesn't say paper is preferred anywhere. That document seems to just be saying, "if you use paper, use this, if digital, use this" for each type of data you want to store.

And while I agree they're not recommending to shred all their paper documents and scan them into PDF, they're also not recommending to print off all your electronic documents and put them into filing cabinets either. Both are acceptable formats for different things, in their opinion.

And while I agree that low acid paper isn't likely to break down over 1000 years if left alone, the odds of the building they are in burning down or getting a silverfish infestation is actually pretty decent over a 1000yr period, so I don't think the odds of them surviving is nearly as good as you think.

And also, while I agree that PDF will likely be replaced a few dozen times in the next millennium, it's also really just a glorified markdown format. Every new standard will have converters to move from the previous standard to the new. Is that work? Certainly. Is it more work than actively maintaining physical archives? No. Especially since, as PDF is the defacto standard for electronic documents for every world government, any major shift in that standard will have well support paths forward for upgrading.

And most importantly, none of your points actually addressed my core point, which was, regardless of which one is "easier" to maintain, it's clear and obvious which one is cheaper. The cost associated with maintaining large physical archives is astronomical. Buying up some cloud storage is minimal.

[–] Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago

It's not like we don't also store the file details of the storage mechanism, we're not going to forget how to decode the exact version of pdf used to store them in a world where we're able to safely store thousands of tons of pointless old legal documents.

And the cost of converting all these old legal documents onto low acid paper and storing them is going to be huge, I really don't think anyone actually wants to do that.

[–] ElBarto@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago

Redundancy is good

It works for Klingons!

[–] ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works 17 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 17 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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?

[–] LotrOrc@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

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

[–] Womble@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 10 months ago

I present to you, somebody who hasn't read the article.

[–] unreasonabro@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 5 points 10 months ago

Saving money for the tax payer by doing things a better way is evil?

[–] ElBarto@sh.itjust.works 12 points 10 months ago

Man some hackers gonna be raking in the inheritance of their extremely large family.

[–] RegalPotoo@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

They have good form in spectacularly fucking this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal

[–] rockandsock@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] mannycalavera@feddit.uk 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] tabular@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] kittyjynx@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

"Hanging chads" on paper ballots helped Bush swing/steal the election from Gore. Paper ballots have a lot of problems too. At least in California every vote on an electronic voting machine generates a paper ballot.

[–] tabular@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Paper systems have problems and years of experience solving them. Multiple parties with different interests watch to verify the input and counting process. Electronic is not watchable, tye result is unverifable - it's not fit for purpose.

[–] pimento64@sopuli.xyz -1 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] mannycalavera@feddit.uk 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] pimento64@sopuli.xyz 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] mannycalavera@feddit.uk 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] pimento64@sopuli.xyz -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] mannycalavera@feddit.uk -1 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] khannie@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That money can be put to better use though, no?

[–] pimento64@sopuli.xyz -3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Why? Better in what sense? Better for whom? I think spending the money on ensuring that paper records are preserved is worth it solely because it monkeywrenches tampering and fraud, so diverting that money would always be worse no matter what it goes to. Money spent on maintaining public parks would be better spent on curing cancer, does that mean we defund parks? Money spent on a necessity is not a waste just because there are other necessities.

Also, even assuming you're right, who cares? I just spent $1.50 on a cup of coffee. That money could have been put to better use, but it wasn't, and it doesn't matter, because it's $1.50. This was my original point, functional states don't have to even think about this cost, they can literally afford to forget it.

[–] khannie@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Yeah, I hear you and I'm not averse to spending money on things that don't bring "direct" value. I fully believe that historical documents are important.

What I'm weighing it against is this: Governments have a fixed annual budget. It's costing 4.5M a year to keep those documents. As the number of historical wills increases over time, so will the cost so there has to be some kind of cutoff point. Given that fixed budget (for example) how many homeless people could be housed versus the downside of having the documents stored in digital format (and it is a downside compared to having the original). I'm only talking about ones for people long since dead btw.

When you have a fixed budget, every penny you spend has an opportunity cost.

And of course I acknowledge that the budget could be increased in ways that allow for the originals to be saved while taxing the ultra rich more to pay for it. The current UK government is unfortunately not going to do that.

[–] RainfallSonata@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Academics have already run those numbers. It's already a decided issue among those who will actually do the preservation what the preferred method is, for which purposes. And no one is saying you can't have multiple purposes or preserve multiple formats, (in fact, that, too, is preferred) except those arguing cost, who, like they do with climate change, want to ignore established science as well as what those actual costs will be.

[–] pimento64@sopuli.xyz 1 points 10 months ago

It's costing 4.5M a year to keep those documents

I cannot stress this enough, that is nothing. You're hand-wringing over an amount of money that falls under the scope of a rounding error in any first-world country's budget. If you want to talk about proper use of resources, a properly-functioning legislative body shouldn't even be able to afford to think about it, let alone discuss it, they should be dealing with a full session's-worth of projects that cost 100—100,000 times as much. If you want to talk about proper use of the taxpayers' money, it doesn't involve elected officials derelicting their actual duties to hem and haw over something that costs under $50 million on the national scale. For a government to have taken any action on this at all is a greater wastage than any potential savings. Seriously, imagine being paid by the public to ensure things are run properly, and then spending your time on the clock discussing whether or not the government should save $4.5M per year by switching brands of floor wax in all of the public schools. People have been tarred and feathered for less.

[–] Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] pimento64@sopuli.xyz 0 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 5 points 10 months ago

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!

[–] TotalFat@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Did they learn nothing from Doctor Who?

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

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.

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