Meanwhile, the Ministry of Justice proposes a destructive digitisation of its archive of a couple of centuries worth of wills.
Is there a reason the originals need to be kept, like for some kind of chemical analysis?
Or should descendants be allowed to claim them, and the rest auctioned off?
Especially for something as generally mundane as wills, it's not obvious to me why high-resolution scans don't suffice for all future historical, legal, and archival purposes.
"Currently about 110 million physical documents are stored costing taxpayers £4.5 million per year. The consultation is seeking views on keeping hard copies for about 25 years, in recognition of their sentimental value to families, while saving them digitally longer term."
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/easier-access-to-historic...
I was wrong to call the _process_ destructive, but I disagree with the proposed disposal policy.
First, they survive technological obsolescence. Consider how even reading a floppy disk is a huge pain in the ass for most people today. Now stretch the time frame.
(Some might say that all you need to do is copy the contents to a new medium when upgrading. Sure, you can do that, but it has a migration cost, and perhaps some risk. It's not a freebie. Compare that to keeping around hard copies.)
Second, they have historically been less ephemeral. Sure, we have durable, write-once media out there that manufacturers claim will last thousands of years (we'll see in...thousands of years), but that's rare.
For important stuff, you should a) keep the hard copy, b) make a digital copy, and c) create backups. You have the option of migrating or reinjesting the original source material, at least.
A well organized archive can have much more redundancy, including georedundancy, for the same price. Further, it can have massively redundant metadata - Imagine if we had a reasonable checksum of every document in the archives of everyone who was interested - And then in the event the main archive was lost or offline, we could have a verified reconstruction from the archives of people who had copies of the metadata and partial copies of the data.
> First, they survive technological obsolescence. Consider how even reading a floppy disk is a huge pain in the ass for most people today.
Most paper hasn't survived technological obsolescence, because it hasn't survived at all. Nobody's keeping anything on floppies, everything's migrated as you say:
> but it has a migration cost, and perhaps some risk. It's not a freebie.
Nobody saying it's a freebie, but it's a heckuva lot cheaper than running massive physical warehouses and libraries and museums with security guards and fire suppression systems and everything. And no, there's virtually no risk when you're always keeping distributed backup copies. We use checksums and things to prevent data corruption.
> Second, they have historically been less ephemeral.
Again, no -- hard copies have historically been far more ephemeral. Remember what happened to the Library of Alexandria? Hard copies are susceptible to fire, war, economic disintegration, and so forth.
Digital copies can both have plenty of geographically distributed official backups made and maintained, and also be open to personal backups as well if desired.
Keeping hard copies around seems like far more expense for zero benefit -- at least for things that don't have sentimental/museum value.
There is a bigger risk with hard copies since they are unique, and storing them is more expensive, so in neither of those points the simple fact that there is a risk and a cost means much, no option is a freebie
I dream of a day when genetic sequencing is so affordable and trivial, that we can analyze records like this for DNA from people and other organisms that came to be deposited on these pieces of paper.
Imagine the possibilities of sequencing the geneomes of all the people who left genetic material on these wills and what that could tell us about society and people who lived in it.
I'm ignorant here -- does simple handling of paper leave a genome's worth of DNA? Is it probable that even a single skin cell was deposited, for example, and that its DNA would remain intact enough?
My impression was that in handling papers, we leave skin oils behind but generally not any cells. I'm happy to be wrong about this, though.
There's DNA on everything, and the ancient DNA on papers stored in an archive will one day be very valuable.
Maintaining a large paper archive is almost free in the grand scheme of things. The UK (and pretty much every single other Western nation) has an absolute ton of abandoned bunkers, silos and mines that were intended for Cold War disaster management. Most of them were built to very high standards in locations that won't flood or degrade significantly even if left cold and dark.
Using them for archive storage is trivial.
This seems like a very poor decision. We're seeing vulnerability after vulnerability pour in this year in just about every single OS out there and yet they think something like this is a good idea?
The UK government appears to be trying to shut the country down without anybody noticing until it's too late; it's very weird to watch.
Yes, it isn't zero-effort, you can't just chuck your papers down a mineshaft and come back for them 50 years later, but it isn't in any way an insurmountable problem.
Fire, one of the biggest concerns in archival practice, is also much harder to manage in underground facilities. Document archive facilities are designed as distinct fire cells to mitigate the risk, and incorporating these features into bunkers would likely require rebuild from scratch. Refrigerant fire suppression systems are difficult to install because of inadequate evacuation routes; Cold War era underground facilities rarely have more than one staircase and one ladder (and the ladder shaft might be full of sand!).
The disused military bunkers of the United States are littered with failed document storage companies that have been unable to sufficiently retrofit them for this use. Seriously, I would guesstimate as many as one in six former ICBM silos was, at some point, owned by one of these operations. More than one per field usually. Almost none have succeeded, and the exceptions have the appearance that they are more hobby projects than viable services. In most cases they didn't even finish stripping the old equipment, which is a very costly process since it has to be cut up underground to hoist out.
Perhaps records only need to last lifetime + 70. That should make storage concerns a lot easier.
Here in Germany, a lot of our old bunkers are effectively gone, unusable to a point where you'd need to entirely rebuild them. And that's after just 30 years... bunkers also need maintenance, because otherwise rot and mold will set in.
A4 is 1/16th of a square metre, so on 80gsm paper with a density of 1.2x water, 1MW (mega will) is about 25m³. An ISO standard TEU shipping container has a volume of about 30m³.
If you spaced everything out 10x you’d still only need 650 containers for all of the UK. That’s about 3% of the volume of a regular container ship, or roughly the number of containers you might see in a Hollywood standard bad guy dockyard confrontation movie scene.