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Ministry of Justice Plans To Digitize Then Destroy 100 Million Historical Wills (theguardian.com) 88

Posted by BeauHD from the physical-vs-digital-archives dept.
"The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitizing and then throwing away about 100 million paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save 4.5 million pounds a year," reports Robert Booth via The Guardian. Leading historians are calling these plans "sheer vandalism" and "insane." From the report: 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 government is proposing to keep the originals of some wills of "famous people" -- likely including those of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Diana, Princess of Wales -- but others would be destroyed after 25 years and only a digital copy would be kept. It is feared that wills of ordinary people, some of whom may become historically significant in the future, risk being lost.

Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links. 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 digitized documents unavailable to users since late October. "We are advocates of digitization but not at the cost of destroying originals," says Natalie Pithers, interim co-chief executive of the Society of Genealogists. "In any digitization projects mistakes get made. We don't know what further information could be gained in the future from the original documents. There could be somebody in there who did something extraordinary."
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Ministry of Justice Plans To Digitize Then Destroy 100 Million Historical Wills More

Ministry of Justice Plans To Digitize Then Destroy 100 Million Historical Wills

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  • Sell or give them away. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Wycliffe ( 116160 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @10:33PM (#64092251) Homepage

    If they don't see value in spending 4.5M a year in upkeep for the original documents, it seems like the logical choice
    is to sell or give them to someone who does value the originals.

    Even if that means the archive is distributed then at least they are not all destroyed.
    And if one does become historically significant then someone who kept that particular one might become lucky.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Eunomion ( 8640039 )
      If I can put on a tinfoil hat for a moment, it strikes me they would be well aware of that logical option, but are opting instead for something utterly crazy. Bureaucrats are not utterly crazy, so there is likely another motive. And the one advantage digitization + destruction gives them is that the only remaining copies, being electronic, would be far more easily manipulate or fake entirely than if there were an original physical document to validate them.

      • As they are scanned, the documents could be placed on a public website along with a list of the SHA512 hash of each image.

        Then anyone concerned can make backups and keep the hash list.

        • I'm pretty sure if you suggest something as technical as "SHA512" to a politician you get arrested. That's my only explanation as to how public officials manage to remain totally ignorant of computer concepts that are directly related to laws they supposedly spend hundreds of hours drafting.

          • Well if they had tried a few years ago they could've said "blockchain" and been buzzword compliant and probably have had multiple offers of private companies to do it all...

          • You don't need to tell the politicians that you're planning to use SHA512, just that you'll be adding a small amount of data for security and validation reasons. That they'll understand, more or less and they'll be reassured by the fact that you're not trying to make them understand the details.
        • You could do that and also sell and/or donate the physical copies. No offense to the cryptology community, but a physical object is almost infinitely more forensically rich than any electronic document ever created.
          • I only say this half tongue-in-cheek but there may still be genetic material of the wills' executors on the document that could be retrievable and useful if someone was so inclined [wiley.com].
            • More than that: Genetic material, the materials used in the paper and ink, which inform about industrial processes at the time of creation, trace minerals indicating the state of certain industries, and also gas absorption speaking to the state of the atmosphere at the time. Physical historical objects can a wealth of information, at least to an historian.

        • Re:Sell or give them away. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @04:47AM (#64092697)

          The problem is one of the historical record. We have no idea if our digital records will be around in another 40-50 years, let alone 1000 years from now. What happens if civilization crashes? Wouldnt future historians want to know what was going on at that point of time, Wills provide a *lot* of useful data (My ma is a genealogists, and ruffling through old wills is a massive source of clues on her investigations. There are *definately* consequences to this.

          • Based on past experience I'd guess that our digital record will NOT be around in another 40-50 years. But there's a concerted effort to destroy the past going on at this point - worldwide culture revolution anyone?

          • What happens if civilization crashes? Wouldnt future historians want to know what was going on at that point of time, Wills provide a *lot* of useful data

            Yes, future historians would want to know. No, it's not really useful information, unless you want to settle a decades-old property dispute. Knowing who left what to whom is not really important unless they are a historical figure (arguably it's not actually important even then, we can all live just as well without knowing) and they also suggest that the documents pertaining to well known public figures will be retained.

            By way of slightly ridiculous example: What exactly went into roman concrete would have

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by HBI ( 10338492 )

              It's not immediately relevant, but a great deal of information about common life in classical Rome has been derived from two sources: graffiti in places like Pompeii, and epitaphs on headstones. One of the issues with the written records from that time is that they were all written by the extreme upper crust of Roman society. And only about issues that they cared about. Not to get all political, but they were all men too. The epitaphs and graffiti capture common folk and women.

              Original medieval documen

            • Nonsense. We learn some very important information from the lives of common folks. Take what we've just been through , a pandemic. We know the broad strokes about SOME historical pandemics from the big writers, but the real nitty gritty, who died, where, when , and in what matter, you find that out from wills and death certificates. Its *incredibly* useful historical panedmic data, and historic pandemic data can inform a LOT of epidemiological strategizing (And we might also have learned that politicians ha

          • And not just wills. When I got out of the Navy, I took my discharge papers and DD 214 down to the Hall of Records and had them entered by my father's suggestion so that I could get new copies when and if I needed them. The last time I went down there to get copies, I not only found my papers but my fathers. Records like this can be very useful to historians, which is why they're never purged. The DD 214 contains a condensed record of your service, including transfers, promotions major disciplinary actio

          • The problem is one of the historical record.

            While the details of historical records can be interesting and provide insight into the thoughts and values of prior generations, I would say that society is better served by not valuing that kind of past.

            Y'all are fucked in the head (as am I, just differently) and passing those fucked in the head ideas about ownership and purpose will just continue passing the disease down through our descendants.

            There are *definately* consequences to this.

            Nobody cares. You don't matter. Let it go.

            What does matter is if the human race will survive... and in its curr

      • If I can put on a tinfoil hat for a moment, it strikes me they would be well aware of that logical option, but are opting instead for something utterly crazy. Bureaucrats are not utterly crazy, so there is likely another motive.

        There is a distinct possibility that it's not really a logical option. They don't think there is enough value to them to pay 4.5M a year to store them. Is there anyone else even willing to step up and take possession and/or foot the bill? It's great to say "we don't want them destroyed" but are these same people willing to take posession or pay to store them? A million sheets of paper weighs over a ton so we are talking over 100 tons of paper that needs to be stored in a way that keeps them dry and verm

        • Yeah, they don't see it as useful, but many people do, and it's part of national heritage. Maybe the government should take care of it? After all 4.5 million quid a year is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of digitization and the recurring cost of ensuring the integrity of the data. Oh, this is the government?
          • How the fuck does it cost 4.5m to store a bunch of documents? The people doing the handling of said documents? Well those people are still going to have to go though the same motions and more to digitize each one as they come in rater than just stuffing it away in a filing cabinet to never see the light of day again ever most likely.

            • How the fuck does it cost 4.5m to store a bunch of documents?

              It would be about 30 large tractor trailers full by my calculation.
              If you want walking space to make it accessible, you probably would need to at least double that.
              That's a lot of space to maintain especially if you are talking climate control.
              4.5M comes out to 375k per month which is probably not too far off from what commercial real estate of that size would cost to lease.
              Then you presumably also need some sort of security and staffing on top of that.

              This does not seem unreasonable at all to me.

              • This is a govt. They should have the funds to buy storage property outright, and i highly doubt they would tax themselves. Only ongoing costs should be utilities and employees. The people employed are going to be employed if this is physical or digital storage. Digital storage will likely only add additional workload to the employees already employed.
        • If they can't keep them anymore, then literally any option for the physical documents would be preferable to intentionally destroying them. That's wildly irrational, and there are plenty of alternatives.

          * Donate them to museums, archives, and other organizations with a preservative mission willing to take them.

          * Auction ones with some special feature of interest.

          * Seek private collectors and enthusiasts willing to store them at their own cost.

          * Ones left over after all of the above, just give t

      • These are stored wills, historical documents only. If you want to put on your tinfoil hat then make a decent conspiracy. The mark of a good conspiracy is that the conspirators stand to gain something. So what do you suppose the government stands to gain from historical legal documents that have been firmly ruled on? It's not like they can just change the digital copy and go to the courts and say "oh it turns out that the last will and testament of Richie Rich actually left everything to me 60 years ago". Th

        • Intentional historical erasure is not an idle danger. Publishers of books, for instance, are now known to be going through classic properties and re-editing them for current "market standards," and not just in new editions: They're seeking out old editions and destroying them to avoid embarrassment. So are moviemakers and TV studios. But you're incredulous at the idea of political entities liking the idea of having purely digital historical records that can be altered with a few lines of code and no phys

          • It's about historical wills, where there are copies for anything relevant.

            Yes I'm sure you can come up with fantastic scenarios why you need to store old shit. You know, like hoarders. But the government has other fish to fry as well and digital scans are fine for most purposes.

            The Dutch Tax & Customs authority hasn't had new paper entries in the archive for years now. They still have two very large and expensive climate controlled and guarded storage areas for historical papers and objects that remain

            • Again, these aren't "fantastic scenarios," they're utterly mundane across all media. And this politics.

              And you're carefully missing the point: The argument is not that they must themselves keep the copies, just that they must find alternatives to destroying them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        More than likely the assumption is that no matter what digital integrity controls they put in place, hashes of the images, cryptography signatures from the officials who did the scanning etc, as long as the original exist when there is a dispute someone will insist the digital version maybe tampered and demand the original on paper be produced. - They might even be correct about that.

        There does seem to be alternate ways to handle this though. One would think some law could be passed to declare the origina

    • There are probably privacy laws or something that make document destruction the bureaucratically easier choice.

      It's also the wrong one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Wills can contain a lot of private information. Selling them would not be possible due to personal data laws, unless the buyer intended to only store and control access to them. I'm which case what is the value of buying them?

    • That was my initial reaction, too. 'Why not digitize them then auction off the originals?' That gets you money on both ends of the transaction.

  • "We are advocates of digitization but not at the" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @10:33PM (#64092255) Homepage Journal

    "We are advocates of digitization but not at the cost of destroying originals,"

    Cool. We'll store them at your house.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      If you keep accumulating and never destroy them, eventually they will fill the whole Earth. So storing them indefinitely just isn't sustainable. I don't know why this is so hard for them to understand.

      • I never even thought the govt would save wills. I figured they would just be used to divy up assets in court when someone dies and it would then just be discarded unless a family member wanted to keep it. I guess you could then have fights for which family member gets to keep the will. So I guess you would have to spell out in your willl who gets to have your will in the end lol.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DarkOx ( 621550 )

          I don't know how things are in the UK but the in the US an estate can be 'reopened' for various reasons.

          Things happen like additional assesses being discovered that were not properly dispersed in the original probate, complex property titles where things like mineral rights revert to land owners after a time, where that owner is the deceased and the heirs subsequently want to squabble over them...

          Again at least in the States things can happen like a person dies intestate, land they own might actually travel

    • Auction them off. Someone will be happy to take a lot of that off their hands.

  • Destroy Wills? (Score:5, Funny)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @10:45PM (#64092273)

    I don't think Kate would like that

  • who controls the present controls the past.

  • Destroying history (Score:3)

    by khchung ( 462899 ) on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @11:39PM (#64092389) Journal

    A civilization that cannot afford to keep its history, won't last long as a continuous civilization.

    • That is a nice-sounding slogan, but please enlighten me, what is the precise definition of "history" that you're using? Does it include the details of the love life of Debbie Harry, for example? What about Nikki McKibbin or Haley Smith?

      • What about the millions of people you've never heard of? We need to keep *all* of every second of their life histories?

    • No civilization can keep *all* of its history. It's not physically possible.

  • Just destroy everything as planned that is not handwritten. That should address future problems with excessive stored paperwork.

  • So... (Score:3)

    by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @12:13AM (#64092439)

    "We are advocates of digitization but not at the cost of destroying originals,"

    What happened to all the written wills that are more than 150 years old and how did you cope with it?

    • You're asserting there was something to deal with, a fact not obviously in evidence. You need property someone else cares about before you need a will, and often not even then. See: primogeniture.

    • What happened to all the written wills that are more than 150 years old

      They were destroyed in the Blitz. The MoJ is just continuing the work that Herman Goering started. In any case it's just a trial balloon to allow the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to start demolishing historic buildings (you can still look up a scanned image online) to save money in upkeep.

      (Some of those facts may have been made up for effect).

  • You will never have owned anything and like it.

  • Vernor Vinge predicted this in Rainbow's End (Score:3)

    by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @03:30AM (#64092643)

    It was a whole university library in the book, but you get the picture. Digitize and destroy.

  • Amusingly shortsighted, like a movie studio scanning the original film in 4k and destroying the original because that should be good enough.

    I can't think this is serious, it must be a plan to get more funding.

    • Economics WOOOSH you.
      Most often archives effectively copy and destroy the old original., especially if the new tech has better quality than the old format (most often the case)
      Old film stock degrades, and poses a huge fire hazard, keeping it gets very very expensive as it scales in volume....

    • There isn't usually even 4k worth of detail in the film grain. And the original negatives are rapidly deteriorating into nothing.

      In a few years the digital 4k scan will be substantially sharper and more true-to-the-original than a decaying piece of film--no matter how well you archive it.

  • Microfilm (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    We already archive newspapers on microfilm; we generally don't keep the original newsprint. Wills may have sentimental value to the family but it's fairly unlikely that there will be surprise revelations not captured by a photograph on 100+ year old wills ("John Smith's will was secretly altered to leave Jane out of the will") that have any historical significance.

    That said, 4.5M pounds a year is not that much in the grand scheme of things.

    • But what if the digitisation process misses a millimetre off the flourish on the stem of an "i" in the last will and testament of Joe Bloggs from Swindon!!!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jd ( 1658 )

        My experience with the British Library's newspaper scans has been that some of the scans are very low resolution. Not just a little low, we're talking completely unreadable.

        My experience of asking for a scan of my own birth certificate was that it was so low resolution it was almost completely illegible.

        Thats a bit more serious than missing a flourish.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      The British Newspaper Archive has a great many scans that are of very poor quality (the paper wasn't flat) of very low resolution.

      The copy I asked of my own birth certificate was of atrociously low resolution, to the point it was unreadable in many places.

      This simply isn't good enough. I have no intrinsic problem with digitised scans, but I have a very serious problem with the quality of such work so far.

  • Priorities (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )

    A government that can afford to buy £4 billion of excess PPE from large donors to government politicians can probably find £4 million a year for quite a considerable number of years before breaking past the rounding-error point.

  • Digitize sure, but destroy the originals? What's going to happen when the digitization process makes an error? Photocopiers have done this in the past: https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]

  • Written records can last longer (Score:5, Informative)

    by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @09:11AM (#64093027) Journal
    The Cautionary Tales podcast recently had an episode [timharford.com] about the relative durability of written records versus digital ones. The principal story revolves around a grand BBC project circa 2000 to create a multimedia snapshot of the whole country at the turn of the millennium. It was meant to be a modern Doomsday Book [wikipedia.org] - fashioned on a national census taken by William the Conqueror in 1086.

    Within a decade the modern project, which was published and distributed on laserdisc, was more or less unreadable. The original materials had vanished. One tech-savvy fellow painstakingly restored some equipment to read out the disc, and posted the whole archive to the Internet. That's gone now, too.

    But original copies of the Domesday Book survive, and are routinely consulted by historians. Although most folks interact with it digitally [nationalarchives.gov.uk].

    • Had it been by the proper national archive authority I'm sure this wouldn't have happened. They are very aware of this issue and mitigate it actively. That's why archival is expensive.

    • So we have one written record that has survived nearly a thousand years, along with countless others at the time that did not survive. The majority of which we don't even know ever existed. Versus one unilateral project inspired by this surviving record in 2000 that was not nearly so valued, and it failed to get preserved.

      Meanwhile, I can pull up on a whim a digitized copy of a Sears catalog from 50 years ago. I can pull up from 30 years ago the first "website" ever made as a "native digital" record. I ca

      • Agreed. The dumb choice to use Laserdisc, and Laserdisc only, would be similar to storing paper records next to a stove. Humans make poor choices with both methods.

  • They even got a minister for common sense now, I kid you not.

    Looks like they needed one very badly.

  • Maybe it's not a good idea but my first impulse on reading "...took to X..." is that those detractors lack general competence. Show me solid arguments from people not inclined to blow hot air on Twitter.

  • ridiculous and antihistorical (Score:3, Insightful)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @11:54AM (#64093451) Journal

    Why isn't anyone asking why it costs 4.5 million a year to store these? That's the real question.

    There's a giant gap between "providing museum-quality archival temperature and humidity-controlled storage" and DESTROYING them.

    Bureaucrats are stupid and play stupid games; I can absolutely see this as a typical budget-play from a pointy-head somewhere in the matrix... "well, if we DON'T get everything we want in the budget, I guess we have to cut corners somewhere so I guess we can just go ahead and destroy all these WILLS from people..." in the same way petulant mayors first threatened budget cuts are always fireman and police, not the "diversity assistant to the regional manager of knob polishing" who happens to be their nephew.

    Throw the fucking things in a file cabinet somewhere. That costs nearly nothing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Holi ( 250190 )

      Maintain climate controlled archives for millions of aging documents is not cheap. But also 4.5 million dollars is pocket change when it comes to UK's GDP.

      • "There's a giant gap between "providing museum-quality archival temperature and humidity-controlled storage" and DESTROYING them."

  • ...and why should it be?

    Whoever wants to keep the originals can - at their own expense or by fundraising. This means that those of historical importance will be kept and paid for by the government (ultimately us then).

    The digital copies should be held in a primary location on secure and unalterable media (yaay, bring PROMs back - what capacity would they be now?) and also on other widely separated sites as backups.

    When a document is requested from the primary site it can be comparatively authenticated from

  • eyeball backwards compatability hard to beat. (Score:3)

    by LeadGeek ( 3018497 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @01:23PM (#64093725)
    Long term data preservation is hard, involves juggling a myriad of possibly to-be-forgotten data formats, and also contending with the storage media flavor-of-the-month. Digital preservation fails in that it cannot be a passive activity, like simply storing a book on a shelf. It's a time consuming, expensive, and error-prone process. Every now and then a faculty member digs up a 3.5" floppy from 20 years ago, and it's all hands on-deck to find a way to read it. 5-1/4 inch floppies are still worse. (never mind bit-rot and media degradation). Ever heard of a Zip-disk? Also, if this all wasn't hard enough, some boneheads want to make this near impossible situation an order of magnitude worse by bringing in laywers and DRM. Sometimes, we as a society still need the guarantee of hands-off preservation only paper can afford. My eyes still work just fine when reading a 100+ year old dead-tree. (well, with my reading glasses on anyway...)

  • I mean how much historical value can a last will and testament have? I cannot imagine they add much beyond trivial information about the end of one's life and estate.

  • Microfilm/fiche has been around as a form of compressed, analog data storage for nearly 100 years. If done with reasonable care, it's truly archival, and more importantly requires no computers, electricity, or en/decoding information to read. A bright light and a lens can do the job. If the proposal was to microfilm it all *and* digitize for easy search/retrieval now, destroying the source documents would be fine. That's been the case for legal documents for a long time. Digitization by itself, though, isn'

  • Unlike ink on paper, todays fused toner will eventually come off in time

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