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UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts

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

56 comments
  • 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.

    • If I care about data never being altered without permission then paper wins over digital, no contest. Paper is not immune to forgery but you can't automate breaking into millions of physical buildings to target certain individuals or mass destroy the documents.

      That is why countries using electronic voting machines over paper should be considered an act of the poor, ignorance or corruption.

    • What can it even cost, at a ceiling? A few hundred thousand a year? I million? Even a hundred million? I expect it's way less, but even if it's half a billion, that is pocket change in the first world. If your government can't afford to write off an expense that miniscule, you live in a failed state.

  • 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.

56 comments