Ministry of Justice Plans To Digitize Then Destroy 100 Million Historical Wills (theguardian.com) 88
"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."
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."
Sell or give them away. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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Re:Sell or give them away. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Re: Sell or give them away. (Score:2)
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Re: Sell or give them away. (Score:1)
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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
Re: Sell or give them away. (Score:2)
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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.
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* 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
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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
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Re: Sell or give them away. (Score:2)
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
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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.
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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
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There are probably privacy laws or something that make document destruction the bureaucratically easier choice.
It's also the wrong one.
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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?
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"We are advocates of digitization but not at the" (Score:4, Insightful)
"We are advocates of digitization but not at the cost of destroying originals,"
Cool. We'll store them at your house.
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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.
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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
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Destroy Wills? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think Kate would like that
Who controls the past controls the future: (Score:2, Interesting)
Destroying history (Score:3)
A civilization that cannot afford to keep its history, won't last long as a continuous civilization.
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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?
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What about the millions of people you've never heard of? We need to keep *all* of every second of their life histories?
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No civilization can keep *all* of its history. It's not physically possible.
Handwritten (Score:2)
So... (Score:3)
"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?
Re: So... (Score:2)
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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).
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If they are made-up, then they aren't facts, Herr Goering.
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I don't see the difference.
you will never... (Score:1)
You will never have owned anything and like it.
Vernor Vinge predicted this in Rainbow's End (Score:3)
It was a whole university library in the book, but you get the picture. Digitize and destroy.
FTM (Score:2)
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.
WOOOSH you (Score:2)
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....
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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)
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.
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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.
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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)
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.
Digital Errors (Score:2)
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)
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].
Re: Written records can last longer (Score:2)
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.
Survivorship bias... (Score:3)
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
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The Brits (sigh) (Score:2)
They even got a minister for common sense now, I kid you not.
Looks like they needed one very badly.
Maybe (Score:2)
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)
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.
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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.
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"There's a giant gap between "providing museum-quality archival temperature and humidity-controlled storage" and DESTROYING them."
I don't see a problem unless they use a certain HD (Score:2)
...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)
What is the historical value? (Score:2)
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.
Digitization alone is not good enough (Score:2)
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'
Much of todays will be gone as well (Score:2)