Comment by happytiger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by happytiger | Hacker News Reader

Digital technology means that 1) the intern can burn down the entire library of Alexandria with the wrong SQL statement (“what’s ‘where?’”), and 2) we still have no real long-term archival solution for data storage that isn’t prohibitively expensive or subject to non-retrieval due to technology advancement

Consider this: please pull the tape backups? What do you mean we don’t have a tape reader anymore and the tape has all gone bad? What about the archival DVD? They only last 25 years? Surely the Zip drive has it on it? The plastic wore out on the read heads? Is that even a thing? Amazon glacier? No SLA? No, ColeSLA isn’t a funny joke Steve. This is serious. Wait. So, where are the land records from 1870 to establish ownership of the property then?

Digital record preservation is hard and gets a lot harder the longer term you try to do it.

Governments do NOT have the proper time horizons or actual costs of preservation in realistic order or top of mind when they talk about these projects being “cost saving.”

> the intern can burn down the entire library of Alexandria with the wrong SQL statement

It's a little ironic to come down negatively on digital data because it can be accidentally deleted easily, when you're comparing it to a library that literally burned down.

> Digital record preservation is hard and gets a lot harder the longer term you try to do it.

Physical record preservation is not walk in the park, either. It's not like paper can just be stored in any old fashion and be expected to not degrade over time.

And with digital records, you can back them up in several different physical locations. With physical records, you're one fire, one burst pipe, one mistake in storage or handling from losing it.

>when you're comparing it to a library that literally burned down

There have been significant improvements in structure fireproofing and firefighting in the past 2071 years.

I just want to state the obvious solution is to digitize and keep the original physical records.

The parties involved don't understand that they're trading the problem of maintaining paper records for the problem of maintaining digital media. Humanity has a lot of experience maintaining paper records with reasonable success. Digital media, not so much.

The issue they have is that the number of wills they have to keep is large and increasing, and will increase forever or at least until they change the rule that they must be kept in some form forever.

On a related topic, and perhaps more importantly/scary, the Land Registry has already gone digital so that deeds to properties are only kept in digital form...

The government department responsible for managing archives has a very good understanding of these issues and has an active remit to help other government departments understand and manage them.

https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-ma...

Is this the same UK government that deliberately destroyed landing records as part of their policy of creating a "hostile environment" for dark skinned immigrants from the Empire? The government has form deleting the past. Why make it easier?

If these were digitised, they'd be public domain; anyone would have the right to create their own copy. Quietly shredding paper documents is a lot easier than getting a court order against Internet Archive. Open digitisation is a very powerful tool to stop governments from throwing things down the memory hole.

> If these were digitised, they'd be public domain

Is that a certainty? "Crown Copyright" is a thing in the UK and other Commonwealth countries, and still seems to be in use:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#United_Kingdom

And leaving history aside for a moment, by now government probably produces lots of native digital records, but that in no way means that they're automatically publicly accessible.

From old news reports, it was at least as much about not wanting to expend the effort to move the boxes when they relocated offices at some point. Not that that is any better.

Did the UK government ever had a regime change since 1066?

Not sure why this is relevant, but yes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution

So we should build another new bureaucracy to make sure that our digitization continuity and archive efforts are successful.

To save money.

Hmm.

That absolutely would save money. The costs of the actual digital storage would be much much lower than for physical items. And once you have an agency that's set up to be experts in digital archival, you can use that for anything, not just these wills.

I think the breakeven is generally around 50 years.

However, it introduces the possibility that records won’t survive the government, and a plethora of other issues that come along with locking into a storage format, the progression of technology, etc.

Bear in mind the average age of countries is only 158 years globally.

It’s not as cut and dry as it initially appears. Everyone is telling me how obvious it is to gain the cost savings, and perhaps it is. But it is by no means as clear cut, especially when you consider the solution of keeping both but reducing the cost of physical archives to pure storage only post-digitization to be a default against destruction. That use case complicates everything.

We also have a boatload of experience maintaining paper records and libraries. We don’t have nearly the track record with digital.

https://lifeshareproject.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/physical-c...

The National Archives are already responsible for managing paper documents held by the government for historical reasons. Given that most of the new documents being added to that archive are digital, it is entirely logical for them to also have responsibility for digitisation.

Keeping paper records is not a solution, it is an admission of failure. We have to figure this stuff out now, because the overwhelming majority of important documents being written today will never exist in printed form and need to be preserved for the future. If we don't trust ourselves to scan and shred old documents, then we have much bigger problems.

Well, it also means we can build X number of copies of the Library of Alexandria, in different countries.

Cries in flooded, moist or burnt down physical archives.

Government could ruin civilization with unexpected moisture.

That’s a strange sounding verbiage.

> ruin civilization with unexpected moisture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth

Civilization has ended once through fire, once through flood, and finally through unexpected moisture.

It just sounds so Douglas Adams.

I don't think anyone's arguing they shouldn't be digitized, just that the originals shouldn't be destroyed.

Sure, but if the original are not safer than the digital versions and also less practical, than maybe that's an argument for digital-only.

With more redundancies, multi-location replication and all that jazz of course.

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