40
Ministry of Justice plan to destroy historical wills is ‘insane’, say experts
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
40 points (97.6% liked)
United Kingdom
4077 readers
288 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Much of that loss is because there was little or no effort to preserve it in first place. There is nothing inherently more fragile about digital data over physical, if anything it’s more robust. Digitised data is perfectly reproducible, there can only ever be one “original” physical document.
But it does require making a proper effort at archiving it. If digital data is effectively duplicated, stored in properly documented formats and regularly maintained for integrity it can theoretically last forever. Gradual degradation and natural and manmade disasters will eventually consume all physical media.
That is still not an argument to *deliberately destroy” physical documents however. There are plenty of good reasons to try to keep them as long as possible, and continue to learn from them, even if their existence will still be finite.
That's asking for a lot more than putting a piece of paper in a box.
We get each other, but let's account for the cost of digital storage.
I agree, but making sure these digital copies are well preserved would probably cost more than keeping the originals.
Well according to the estimates given in the article the opposite is true and digitisation would save 4.5m£ p.a. Archival of paper has its own costs after all. You need climate controlled environments, regular review of the documents to make sure they aren't damaged by organics or anything, and physical storage space.
So not only is this argument probably wrong, engaging with it also gives credence the people suggesting that saving a paltry 4.5 million £ a year (which is about 0.06 £ per capita) is worth the downsides of this move, which it isn't according to all the experts cited in the article. The focus should be on the lost information, not on the costs.
Hell, at those costs you could just store them both physically and digitally without much difference in the overall budget (except for the initial digitisation of the physical documents). Digital storage is very cheap even with redundancies, and integrity checking can be automated.
Somehow I read it completely wrong, as they are saying the cost would be 4.5m and that sounded too cheap, this is why I was skeptical about their costs estimations. But yeah, I agree with you in every point.