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 One would think that by then they are outdated and no longer needed.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?
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the government to provide services efficiently yet the second anyone suggests not doing things the most expensive and outdated way possible everyone loses their minds.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.
“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.
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?
Man some hackers gonna be raking in the inheritance of their extremely large family.
They have good form in spectacularly fucking this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
Did they learn nothing from Doctor Who?
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.
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.
