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UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 11 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts::Department hopes to save £4.5m a year by digitising – then binning – about 100m wills that date back 150 years

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[–] XTL@sopuli.xyz 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Storing a lot of valuable paper is expensive.

[–] RainfallSonata@lemmy.world -1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Much less expensive than maintaining the digital format they're scanned into over hundreds of years, or upgrading the format each time the technology evolves. Eventually you reach a point where it's better to re-scan into the new format rather try to upgrade for the 50th time. But then you haven't maintained the originals. Under the right conditions, paper can last thousands of years.

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wait, hold on. Are you arguing that, in the long run, it's cheaper to pay rent and maintenance on facilities and personnel to caretake reams of paper than to have a bunch of PDFs on Google Drive?

Paper isn't some magical substance that doesn't need any maintenance ever. Silverfish, fire, water, and a million other things need to be actively guarded against to keep these records usable.

On the other hand, PDF has been around since 1992, and it hardly seems to be going anywhere. And even if it does, running a "PDF to NewStandard" converter on the files every 30 years or so seems unlikely to cost as much as 30yrs of rent on a physical building. And that holds true even over the course of 1000yrs. Rent's not cheap, and neither are people who maintain physical records.

Like, I'm not advocating for destroying the physical documents, but the idea that it's even remotely close to being cheaper to keep them as paper vs digitizing is an absolute fantasy.

[–] RainfallSonata@lemmy.world -1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Not just me. There's plenty of academic research on the subject. Here's the Library of Congress' preferred format for preservation of all types of documents. https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/index.html

I'm totally willing to bet any pdf will be unreadable in 1000 years. Low-acid paper, not only possible, but likely.