“Sheer vandalism” and “insane”. This is how leading historians on Monday described government plans to destroy millions of historical wills to save on storage costs.
The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitising and then throwing away about 100m paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save £4.5m a year.
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”. Sir Richard Evans, historian of modern Germany and modern Europe, said “to destroy the original documents is just sheer vandalism in the name of bureaucratic efficiency”.
Ministers believe digitsiation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X, formerly Twitter, to decry it as “bananas” and “a seriously bad idea”.
it’s tempting to think digitization is forever, but we’ve already lost so much of the internet to link rot and server shutdowns in just 30 years. paper is actually longer lasting than digital, lol
Yeah, it certainly can go that way unfortunately. I’m in favour of digitisation generally, but at a minimum it relies on:
- Redundant storage (always), hosted and paid for by the government (in this case).
- Published and documented open file formats.
I believe that, in general, things lost to time on the net violate one of those two rules. They either resided on a single privately held server which was discontinued, or the data was locked up in some proprietary file format which was inevitably replaced for the sake of selling the new software product.
The benefits of pulling this off correctly are enormous:
- Data lasts a very long time.
- Documents can be authenticated and change-controlled.
- Documents can be shared with any number of users simultaneously.
Much of that loss is because there was little or no effort to preserve it in first place. There is nothing inherently more fragile about digital data over physical, if anything it’s more robust. Digitised data is perfectly reproducible, there can only ever be one “original” physical document.
But it does require making a proper effort at archiving it. If digital data is effectively duplicated, stored in properly documented formats and regularly maintained for integrity it can theoretically last forever. Gradual degradation and natural and manmade disasters will eventually consume all physical media.
That is still not an argument to *deliberately destroy” physical documents however. There are plenty of good reasons to try to keep them as long as possible, and continue to learn from them, even if their existence will still be finite.
effectively duplicated, stored in properly documented formats and regularly maintained for integrity
That’s asking for a lot more than putting a piece of paper in a box.
We get each other, but let’s account for the cost of digital storage.
I agree, but making sure these digital copies are well preserved would probably cost more than keeping the originals.
Well according to the estimates given in the article the opposite is true and digitisation would save 4.5m£ p.a. Archival of paper has its own costs after all. You need climate controlled environments, regular review of the documents to make sure they aren’t damaged by organics or anything, and physical storage space.
So not only is this argument probably wrong, engaging with it also gives credence the people suggesting that saving a paltry 4.5 million £ a year (which is about 0.06 £ per capita) is worth the downsides of this move, which it isn’t according to all the experts cited in the article. The focus should be on the lost information, not on the costs.
Hell, at those costs you could just store them both physically and digitally without much difference in the overall budget (except for the initial digitisation of the physical documents). Digital storage is very cheap even with redundancies, and integrity checking can be automated.
Somehow I read it completely wrong, as they are saying the cost would be 4.5m and that sounded too cheap, this is why I was skeptical about their costs estimations. But yeah, I agree with you in every point.
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!
