The House Of Lords To Abandon Vellum?

[rwilsonedn]

According to today's New York Times, the British House of Lords has decided to end its tradition of recording legislation on vellum for the archives. They claim they can save 80,000 British pounds a year by switching to archival paper, which is easier to obtain and store. Historians and traditionalists are outraged, pointing out that vellum has recorded British political and legal history at least since the Domesday Book. And while vellum has been known to last 5000 years, the expected shelf life of archival paper is more like 250 years. Perhaps those time frames don't mean much to the majority of the Lords, who are life peers, and whose titles will end with them.

ron

[Tas]

I dispair sometimes, I really do.

[Biber]

All over 80,000? Seriously? I should think their sense of tradition would have made it moot point to begin with.

Edited February 11, 2016 by Biber

[Ursus]

It's a sad, sad day for the House of Lords!

[hellokloh]

Perhaps the combination of archival paper + digital records means vellum is no longer necessary.

 

Of all the traditions they hold on to though, this seems like a weird choice of tradition-to-change.

[Flounder]

I'm opposed to this change. When the dust settles and blame need to be properly apportioned, we'll need good sturdy records.

[Mercian]

Perhaps the combination of archival paper + digital records means vellum is no longer necessary.

Has anyone here ever tried to recover data stored on media intended for use with a 1980s home computer?

Digital formats become obsolescent - and hence the data held in them becomes irrecoverable - more rapidly than any other storage medium.

One might as well 'store' data by writing it in washable blue ink on toilet paper, and then throwing the 'archive' into a damp cellar.

 

In the context of HMG's budget (even in the context of merely the budget of the Palace of Westminster) £80,000 is a nugatory saving - this whole thing looks rotten to me :-(

[Tas]

Has anyone here ever tried to recover data stored on media intended for use with a 1980s home computer?

Digital formats become obsolescent - and hence the data held in them becomes irrecoverable - more rapidly than any other storage medium.

One might as well 'store' data by writing it in washable blue ink on toilet paper, and then throwing the 'archive' into a damp cellar.

 

In the context of HMG's budget (even in the context of merely the budget of the Palace of Westminster) £80,000 is a nugatory saving - this whole thing looks rotten to me :-(

 

Yes, this !

[Dragonmaster Lou]

Has anyone here ever tried to recover data stored on media intended for use with a 1980s home computer?

Digital formats become obsolescent - and hence the data held in them becomes irrecoverable - more rapidly than any other storage medium.

One might as well 'store' data by writing it in washable blue ink on toilet paper, and then throwing the 'archive' into a damp cellar.

 

Well, this is mitigated somewhat by using properly documented open file formats (and it never hurts to have the documentation of the format written down on a non-digital medium as a secondary backup). If you have an open file format, then if you can access the media, you can read the file format. The worst case scenario is that you'd need to write new software to read the file format based on the existing specifications. Of course, for this to even work, you'd need to make sure that you replace the physical archival media as older media become obsolete. E.g. transfer the data from floppy disks to optical media (CD, DVD, etc.), transfer from optical to what the next format is, etc. as the old media starts to become obsolete. Of course, this requires more labor and potentially more cost over the long term than just sticking a sheet of vellum on a shelf in a vault.

 

In the context of HMG's budget (even in the context of merely the budget of the Palace of Westminster) £80,000 is a nugatory saving - this whole thing looks rotten to me :-(

Yeah, this seems like kind of a silly thing to be arguing over compared to the whole of the budget. Not being a UK citizen, I really don't have any skin in this game, so to speak, but I do think it's a neat tradition and canning it certainly doesn't seem to have any palpable benefits.

[ArchiMark]

Good Lord!

 

[dogpoet]

I'm opposed to this change. When the dust settles and blame need to be properly apportioned, we'll need good sturdy records.

 

Yes, but that's probably part of the reason.

[inkypete]

OK - that's it! I have always been a loyal Monarchist here in Australia with little interest in Independence. This has changed my mind. I will join the next independence rally. Find the person who has made this decision, throw him in the Tower of London and off with his head.

 

On the serious side, a break with centuries of tradition like this is so petty. 80,000 quid? The Queen would spend that on cucumber sandwiches in a year.

[macaddicted]

PETA, and other animal rights groups, aren't trying to protect cucumbers. I'd bet the reason is animal hides; the excuse is (a pittance of) savings.

[Mercian]

E.g. transfer the data from floppy disks to optical media (CD, DVD, etc.), transfer from optical to what the next format is, etc. as the old media starts to become obsolete. Of course, this requires more labor and potentially more cost over the long term than just sticking a sheet of vellum on a shelf in a vault.

 

Undoubtedly more costly, and undoubtedly more-likely to lead to replication errors damaging/destroying records.

Of course, a ‘need’ to constantly transfer files from 'format a' to 'format b', then from 'format b' to 'format c', then from 'format c' etc ad infinitum, would provide a great 'opportunity' for awarding a sequence of Outsourcing contracts to offshore companies owned by the chums with whom one 'schooled'....

Not, you understand, that I am even for one moment suggesting that any hint of Corruption, nepotism, or 'jobs for the boys' could possibly be found in the ongoing sequence of lucrative taxpayer-funded contracts being awarded to the same small group of 'middleman' firms over and over, despite those firms' long-established track records of cost over-runs, failure to deliver services to contractually-required standards, failure to get their sub-contractors to deliver services to agreed and/or legally-required standards, and litany of 'accidentally' billing the taxpayer for work that has either not been done, or which has already been paid for.

 

'Cynical'? Moi?

 

PETA, and other animal rights groups, aren't trying to protect cucumbers. I'd bet the reason is animal hides; the excuse is (a pittance of) savings.

 

I think that that attitude is a short-sighted one. We *already* have herds of goats that we raise for meat, milk, and wool.

Even if PETA et al were to get a ban on the use of goats for meat and milk, there are still the herds from which we get wool.

The animals in those herds are not immortal. Their corpses have to be disposed of.

 

We *could* use the skins from those goats for vellum and leather - thereby saving the energy, resources, and wildlife habitats expended in managing forests and making paper. Or we could expend more energy in throwing away the skins, and more energy still on making substitute materials.

 

I say use the skins for vellum and for leather.

From the planet's point of view, it makes good use of more of the animal, and it reduces the need to expend other resources on finding/making other materials to use instead of vellum and leather.

And, from a British citizen's point of view, it keeps our legislative records more-easily readable for longer in to the future.

[Flounder]

Here's a pretty good blogpost from the Worcester Cathedral Library on this subject. Looks like papyrus is unsuitable, unless we can speed up desertification.

 

https://worcestercathedrallibrary.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/vellum-vs-paper-the-battle-for-longevity/

[macaddicted]

 

I think that that attitude is a short-sighted one. We *already* have herds of goats that we raise for meat, milk, and wool.

Even if PETA et al were to get a ban on the use of goats for meat and milk, there are still the herds from which we get wool.

 

 

They want to get rid of the herd, regardless of the materials they supply.

 

The animals in those herds are not immortal. Their corpses have to be disposed of.

 

 

No herd no disposal.

 

 

We *could* use the skins from those goats for vellum and leather - thereby saving the energy, resources, and wildlife habitats expended in managing forests and making paper. Or we could expend more energy in throwing away the skins, and more energy still on making substitute materials.

I say use the skins for vellum and for leather.

 

You're being rational. It's not fair to them

 

From the planet's point of view, it makes good use of more of the animal, and it reduces the need to expend other resources on finding/making other materials to use instead of vellum and leather.

And, from a British citizen's point of view, it keeps our legislative records more-easily readable for longer in to the future.

Look, PETA compared Kentucky Fried Chicken to the Nazis (sorry, Godwin got here quick) when they claimed that eating chicken is equivalent to the holocaust. I agree with them about as much as I agree with ardent socialists on economic theory. Yet, to use another animal example based on animals, the traditional fox hunt isn't a tradition anymore. It was stopped by the animal rights groups.

[Mercian]

Yet, to use another animal example based on animals, the traditional fox hunt isn't a tradition anymore. It was stopped by the animal rights groups.

 

Actually, that's not correct; you have been misinformed.

The wording of the particular law was another classic case of British Fudge (like our Constitution, which is not encoded in one single document, but is instead spread across many different clauses of many different Acts from many different centuries).

 

Using hounds to flush out a fox is not illegal, and nor is riding horses after them while they chase the animal, as long as your intent when it comes to killing the animal is to have a marksman shoot it.

The law allows for the fact that dogs will 'sometimes' get-to and kill the fox before the marksman/marksmen get a chance to shoot it.

This, naturally, often results in what Sir Humphrey Appleby might term ‘a debatable, and penumbrageous outcome’.

 

Many Hunts here just flout the law, safe in the knowledge that they won't get prosecuted for doing so, because it is very, very difficult (not to mention prohibitively expensive at a time of national Austerity) to police the law to get enough proof to secure a conviction.

 

In practice most of the Hunts are still going just as they were before the Act was passed.

E.g. the area Hunt where I live came past our house on New Year's Day (although they hadn't found an actual fox at that point, so horses and riders and supporters in vehicles were scattered across many fields in the process of searching for one rather than in an ongoing pursuit).

 

But we're properly into highly emotive/Can of Worms territory here, so I shall say no more.

[jmccarty3]

Most regrettable! They should retain a Native American Indian to scalp the (bleep) who proposed this nonsense, and use the vellum obtained from his scalp instead.

 

The British appear anxious to commit cultural suicide.

[dcwaites]

I have been in the IT industry for over 3 decades, virtually the whole lifespan of personal computers.

I have seen mainframe hard drives crash, resulting in the head gouging a 1 cm groove through a 40 cm disk from a disk pack.

I have seen paper tapes and cards go, and magnetic tapes go, so that in Australia we MAY have one machine left that can read paper tapes, and possibly one machine that can still read punch cards. It's heading that way with mag. tapes too.

 

I have seen 8", 4.5" and 3.26" floppy disks come and go. CDs have come and gone for storage, and DVDs are on the way out. Zip disks and various other abominations have all come and gone.

 

Currently we are up to using external hard drives as storage and replacing them, and copying all the data, every few years.

Having lost (due to them being unreadable) hundreds of gigabytes worth of backups on DVDs, I now work on keeping at least 2, and preferably more, backups and copies on hard disk drives.

 

I would not trust a country's history to digital storage.

[Ursus]

On the serious side, a break with centuries of tradition like this is so petty. 80,000 quid? The Queen would spend that on cucumber sandwiches in a year.

 

 

Now, do you really want Her Majesty to eat cheese and ham like the rest of us? Besides, it is only in Norway that they still charge £ 10 for a cucumber.

 

What I really like is the idea that legal documents might simply disappear, and that the House of Lords will then have to discuss what they actually desided: "Now, it might be 200 years ago, but I clearly remember that we all agreed, back in 2016, that I would be right."