I understand why it is not a good idea to digitize, as tampering might be easier to do without any traces, but why do they store wills for 150 years? One would think that by then they are outdated and no longer needed.

Edit: looks like the concern is about historical artifacts. Feels even more ridiculous than I thought. What's next, taking pictures of historical paintings and destroying originals? Why not digitize and still keep the originals?

Digitising wills: ok, cool.

Destroying paper originals: Oh god no, why?!

It's not insane, it's malicious. Done with ill intent. How many times do we have to see shit like this before we stop giving obvious evil the benefit of the doubt?

They have good form in spectacularly fucking this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal

Man some hackers gonna be raking in the inheritance of their extremely large family.

The answer seems simple. Digitise the wills and any of historical value as identified by an independent body made up of Twitter historians can keep the originals for prosperity and research 😂.

Digitise the lot and start with new wills. I understand the value to historians of keeping old pieces of paper but at some point the costs of that have to be evaluated against the benefits. You can't just say "it's of an unquantifiable amount therefore we need to keep them", that's such a lazy cop out.

In fact I'm increasingly frustrated that all legal documents aren't digitised. Shuffling paper around is so backwards and a nightmare to search and index efficiently.

Isn't 4.5 million pounds just the tea and biscuit budget for parliament?

They want to destroy historical documents to save a rounding error in the government budget?

Let one of big wealthy universities look after the historically significant ones. That should save a bunch of money right there.

Did they learn nothing from Doctor Who?

What the article doesn't reveal is how they want to digitise this stuff and where it'll be stored. Will it be on IPFS? On a blockchain? A public cloud like AWS where the bill might jump unexpectly to more than 4.5M pounds a year?

It might be an OK idea, but it feels like this will be horribly bungled.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

This is the best summary I could come up with:

But Tom Holland, the classical and medieval historian and co-host of The Rest is History podcast, said the proposal to empty shelves at the Birmingham archive was “obviously insane”.

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 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.

He said the idea that officials can choose which wills to keep because, in the words of the MoJ, they “belong to notable individuals or have significant historical interest”, is “the typical arrogance of bureaucracy”.

He cited the example of Mary Seacole, the Jamiacan nurse who helped British soldiers during the Crimean war in the 1850s, whose story has been revived in recent years.

Digitalisation allows us to move with the times and save the taxpayer valuable money, while preserving paper copies of noteworthy wills which hold historical importance.”

The original article contains 883 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I mean you could do it with a otc tape library, a SAN, and a relatively inexpensive offsite tape agreement. You'd spend a couple mil setting it up. But tape, disk and support wouldn't be unreasonable moving forward.