This week, the Ministry of Justice launched a consultation on its plan to digitise its vast archive of wills. The only problem is that it also wants to destroy its original paper copies – which date from 1858.
This destruction is supposed to save the taxpayer £4.5 million per year, although wills that ‘belong to notable individuals or have significant historical interest’ will be retained. The proposal has been met with strong disapproval by historians and archivists – not because digitisation is inherently a bad idea, but because digitising an archive and then destroying the originals was never how it was meant to work.
Digitisation does have a role to play in preserving documents – it reduces human handling for a start – but its primary purpose was always to make records accessible. The National Archives, for example, has digitised all the wills it holds, and they can be downloaded for a modest fee.
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