Department hopes to save £4.5m a year by digitising – then binning – about 100m wills that date back 150 years

“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.

The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitising and then throwing away about 100m paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save £4.5m a year.

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”. Sir Richard Evans, historian of modern Germany and modern Europe, said “to destroy the original documents is just sheer vandalism in the name of bureaucratic efficiency”.

Ministers believe digitsiation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X, formerly Twitter, to decry it as “bananas” and “a seriously bad idea”.

  • @troydowlingEnglish
    9•11 months ago

    Yeah, it certainly can go that way unfortunately. I’m in favour of digitisation generally, but at a minimum it relies on:

    1. Redundant storage (always), hosted and paid for by the government (in this case).
    2. Published and documented open file formats.

    I believe that, in general, things lost to time on the net violate one of those two rules. They either resided on a single privately held server which was discontinued, or the data was locked up in some proprietary file format which was inevitably replaced for the sake of selling the new software product.

    The benefits of pulling this off correctly are enormous:

    1. Data lasts a very long time.
    2. Documents can be authenticated and change-controlled.
    3. Documents can be shared with any number of users simultaneously.