Ministry of Justice plan to destroy historical wills.

[John Green]

"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 digitised documents unavailable to users since late October.

“My real anxiety is that if everything is digitised, somebody pulls the plug,” said Holland whose awareness of the risks of mixing digitisation and archives is all the greater as he is a board member of the British Library.

Hardware goes out of date and so it might not be available in the future to recall the scanned documents, he said. Access to original documents was vital as “the physicality of the evidence matters … it is an important part of the material culture”. www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/18/ministry-of-justice-plan-to-destroy-historical-wills-is-insane-say-experts

[John Wall]

I agree. I’ve previously advised those digitising pictures to preserve the originals so that, if necessary, they can be rescanned in the future.

[sonnybh]

Where I work I sometimes handle old documents scanned onto microfilm, which can be quite hit & miss quality wise, especially when printed out then re-scanned.

[garygraham]

There are so many dangers with this: initial scans not being done properly, server-based storage and backups can be hacked and it can be a while before anyone notices, mistakes with backups, solar flares, data tape and optical disc storage and the technology to play back may only have a lifespan of 20 years, migrating data every couple of decades is a cost and there may be no money to do it, the need to store in more than one location, a single malicious person can inflict massive damage unless there are safeguards.

A paper archive can go up in flames of course. The sensible way forward is to keep all the paper and have digital copies elsewhere and for general access.

[anthonybartley]

"“Sheer vandalism” and “insane”. This is how leading historians on Monday described government plans to destroy millions of historical wills to save on storage costs."

Interesting timing - with the Royals recently exposed as the entity that eats up a great many "unclaimed" wills - with the money used to restore royal properties which they then rent out for profit and personal gain.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/23/how-royal-estates-use-bona-vacantia-to-collect-money-from-dead-people-king-charles

"Not without controversy, the duchies still exist in the present day and have become cash cows for the royals, who receive annual payouts. Last year, the Duchy of Lancaster paid Charles £26m. Buckingham Palace says this should be regarded as his “private” income."

I wonder if there's a connection? It would be a very handy way to make lots of rather inconvenient paperwork simply disappear.

[John Green]

A follow-up article: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/01/the-guardian-view-on-digital-only-archives-material-items-still-matter-to-historians

[garygraham]

This article is linked in the Guardian piece:

longnow.org/ideas/shining-a-light-on-the-digital-dark-age/

Very interesting on the amount of data we're generating and being able to access it.

I have text files going back to 1988. Emails and forum packets from 1992 and web bookmarks back to 1998 (though hardly any of them work). In 2000 everything I'd ever created digitally would fit on a couple of data CDs. Digital video was the gamechanger of course...

VHS is still a great storage format. Three hours on a £1 tape that lasts 50 years

[John Wall]

petition.parliament.uk/petitions/654081

[garycritcher]

Never, EVER, destroy the originals.
I have an archive of 16mm, 8mm, Super-8 and 9.5mm motorsport film.
It's all been telecined and then digitised for handy access. I would never get rid of the original film.