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Ministry of Justice plan to destroy historical wills is ‘insane’, say experts (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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“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”.

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[–] shalafi 3 points 11 months ago

effectively duplicated, stored in properly documented formats and regularly maintained for integrity

That's asking for a lot more than putting a piece of paper in a box.

We get each other, but let's account for the cost of digital storage.