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
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
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.
Adobe Flash entered the chat.
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
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.
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.
My hard copy birth certificate isn’t doing too well even after much shorter time.
If that PDF represents a part of a curated collection, then I’d be willing to bet the data will be readable in a perfectly preserved way in a thousand years. I have been casually copying files and have nearly accidentally preserved all sorts of data that would have been tossed out decades ago if it were paper based.
The key word is curated, and applies to both paper and digital works. If neglected, either one has a risk of being lost or destroyed.
We have survivorship bias about paper records. We see a famous preserved work from a thousand years ago and declare “wow, paper lasts forever, but I lost a burned cd from not even 20 years ago, paper is obviously better”. However that paper was ordered by royalty of the day and put under the curation of a Treasury as a highly valuable artifact from the moment it was created.
Far more paper records have been lost or destroyed than we even know to have existed.