9 ms·

Why is the UK still printing its laws on vellum?

104 points by jjp 11y ago

lhnz 11y ago
I wonder what the maintenance costs would be to keep a digital document storage system running robustly and effectively for 800 years (as long as the Magna Carta document lasted)? (Not trying to imply that vellum should be the only storage method but that sounds like cheap robustness, and I'd not want to throw that away just because you want to be capital-D Digital.)
- richmarr 11y ago
  > Not trying to imply that vellum should be the only storage method but that sounds like cheap robustness Not to mention supporting the UK's tourism brand... castles and queens and whatnot.
  - ranko 11y ago
    The documents discussed here are acts of parliament, which almost no-one (particularly tourists) will ever see once they've been stored in the tower.
    - richmarr 11y ago
      You're missing the distinction between brand & marketing there. The Situation Room is part of the Whitehouse's brand whether tourists get to see it or not.
      - neximo4 11y ago
        The other thing is it is real of course, the intent of it isn't for tourists, neither are the 'castles and queens' and the branding as you put it. Not saying it doesn't help tourism, its just not the intent of it all & doesn't have much bearing on the decisions being taken as much as the simple act of continuing traditions.
- a-priori 11y ago
  The closest equivalent I can think of immediately is Amazon Glacier, which is intended for 'long-term' storage where they take care of transferring the data as necessary to preserve its accessibility. Obviously they're thinking years-to-decades, not centuries, but as a ballpark it may work. Their current pricing is $0.0007 per GB-month, or $0.000064 per KB for 800 years in today's dollars. Since the Latin text of Magna Carta is 28 KB of UTF-8 text, that works out to $0.0018 to store the text for 800 years. You'd obviously also want a high-resolution scan of the original document. I don't know how big that would be. If it was a 100MB image, it would cost $6.66 to store for 800 years at Amazon's current Glacier prices. Obviously we're making immense assumptions about the reliability of the service, of price stability to deliver the quality of service, and so on. And perhaps the biggest issue with this analysis is that we're also relying on huge economies of scale for it to be profitable to deliver an archival service like this over centuries. If this sounds crazy cheap to you, you're not alone. As technologists we're used to dealing with huge volumes of data, so it's easy to forget that historically these volumes simply did not exist.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    > Obviously we're making immense assumptions about the reliability of the service Even assuming the corporate entity will survive that long is dicey. To ensure survival of a document on such as service you can not just look at the cost of a storage service, but the cost of infrastructure to care for it. E.g. just the matter of keeping an organization alive for the duration to ensure an account is kept active and live and prepared to ensure each and every monthly bill is paid.
  - brudgers 11y ago
    The Magna Carta survived wars and revolutions and changes of government and economic collapses and the Black Death. Glacier may struggle with a long electrical blackout.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- beejiu 11y ago
  Given the government's history of failed and overbudget IT projects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_custom_software_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_...), probably billions of pounds for something that half works.
- profmonocle 11y ago
  Hard to say, considering tech will continue to evolve over that time. Who knows, 100 years from now we might have found an extremely reliable way to store digital information long-term, thus we'd only have to do the "copy from one medium to another" dance for a few generations. Or we might not.
- chippy 11y ago
  It would require a trust, a fund and a dedicated organisation, possibly using lawyers. Legal documents relating to land and titles have survived for hundreds of years in this manner. It's a social not a technological problem. But how to do it is much easier to solve. Why to do it is the actual problem. What to keep and when to keep it without knowing the future. How does anyone know that the 100 photos that a person from Morocco put onto Flickr 5 years ago would have value in the future? Why should those be archived? In 200 years these photos could be immensely valuable. How can this potential future value ensure the archiving of the photos today? Is there economics for this?
- avani 11y ago
  Our research group is looking at this exact question, and it turns out that there are several factors that effect the balance between cost and reliability/longevity in an archive. Paper: http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/gupta-mascots14.pdf http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/gupta-mascots14.pdf
forinti 11y ago
Are they still "printed" by hand? I couldn't find any details.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  Nope. They print them via an normal computer printer, using A4 sheets of vellum e.g. https://i.imgur.com/xyXBBln.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xyXBBln.jpg The end result is almost indistinguishable from the paper version of the same, unless you touch it.
  - detaro 11y ago
    I wonder if there is any data on the reliability of the used printer ink.
    - Someone1234 11y ago
      I was thinking the same thing. I couldn't find anything when I googled it.
    - aristus 11y ago
      If it's laser toner, then it's resin and carbon fused to the page at a high heat. Carbon is an element so can't fade, and resin's only problem is ultraviolet. Pretty stable combo. I did a lot of research on this subject and concluded that acid-free rag + laser should last 500+ years. http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html
      - michrassena 11y ago
        I didn't see your comment when I posted. Carbon seems like an ideal archival pigment in this case.
  - michrassena 11y ago
    I'm assuming that they are using some kind of archival ink, but the real issue is how long the ink will last.
Someone1234 11y ago
Vellum works and has been proven to work for hundreds of years. Archival paper is interesting but largely unproven tech. On paper it works (no pun intended) but we really haven't seen if it will last even 200 years, and we should before we start printing our most treasured documents on it. Digital long term storage is just, no. Look, all key UK documents are ALREADY digital they're available to download right now. However we aren't talking about digital Vs. non-digital, we're talking about what to store BACKUPS on. Digital long term storage is something people who frankly know little about technology point to. It is up to IT-types to figure out the costs and the "how?" from then on out. There is no digital storage media which will still exist reliably in 200-400 years, not CDs, not HDDs, and not SSDs. Tapes are the closest and they won't last that long. So we aren't talking about slapping it on a CD and storing it in some archive, we're talking about slapping it on a piece of digital media today and then moving it every one hundred years without fail, or we lose it forever... If one government or generation loses interest then future generations suffer (see the current government as an example: moving away from reliable Vellum to unproven papers). Plus with digital you also have to worry about: solar flares/EMP, format knowledge (both of the file system & file format), media protocol knowledge (SATA or CDs might be forgotten technology), and the ability to alter historical documents without detection (not that vallum is immune, but it requires more skill/time). PS - The "Digital Preservation Coalition" are a group of historians and archivists. They aren't technologists, they just point blindly at digital without explaining the nitty gritty of HOW.
- imprecision 11y ago
  Entirely agree with you about the current lack of longer term stable data storage options. That said, waiting the full duration of a material's projected life span before actual use of that material would limit options hugely, especially with the massively increasing corpus of generated data. In this sort of context (amount of data) one can spread your bets and use vellum, as well as other methods, until other more stable forms of storage are easily available. Interesting piece released yesterday related to long term data storage; a projected lifespan of 13.8 billion years doesn't sound too bad... University of Southampton - http://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-update.page http://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-up...
CapitalistCartr 11y ago
There is no such medium as digital. Digital is the encoding method. All media have a lifespan, a certain durability. That determines its future survivability. A digital format could be coded onto vellum, but plain text is more reliable. This is the typical enthusiasm for "technology" by leaders who know only how to get re-elected.
- rileymat2 11y ago
  This message has been brought to you by the office of pedantry: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/digital http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/digital 5. available in electronic form; readable and manipulable by computer: Scan these two pages so you'll have them as a digital document.
  - Vivtek 11y ago
    It's not pedantry. "Digital" says nothing about the physical medium, which is a crucial issue if what you're talking about is the viability of long-term archives. Much better to say "magnetic" or "optical" or what have you, but merely to say "It's the 21st century, we should be digital now!" marks an argument as poorly considered.
  - ethagknight 11y ago
    You picked out #5 of 11 distinct definitions for digital, several of which could apply here. Not pedantry to be more specific.
- pdabbadabba 11y ago
  This is a good point, for more reasons that mere pedantry. Describing storage methods as "digital" also encourages people two conflate two equally important but distinct concerns: 1. Durability of the physical medium over long periods of time, and 2. Our ability to decode extract information from the media even if they do physically survive. (I remember this being a hot issue several years ago, but one that seems to have faded a bit recently.)
ape4 11y ago
Well, for one its kind of cool.
jameslk 11y ago
The next Rosetta Stone will have to translate one filesystem to another.
rusanu 11y ago
Reminds me of the 'leafs' from Anathem[0]. for sure none of the current digital storage artifacts will be readable in +500 years, like scrolls. Contiguous upgrade required by digital will always have a cost and only 'certain' items will end up surviving, where the criteria for choosing will vary with fashion, religion, politics. Wonder is archaeologist in 2500 CE will reveal "500 years old file discovered in digital archives" and then, year later, announce the succesful decoding of an original cca. 2016 animated cat GIF... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem
- rtkwe 11y ago
  Anathem was inspired by the Long Now which is trying to build the 10,000 year Clock and Library. They've been doing a lot of work to try to preserve things for that long. One attempt is the Rosetta Project which is text and info on 1500 languages in 13000 pages etched and electroformed onto a nickle platter. [1] [1] http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/
fimbaz 11y ago
Without reading the article, maybe... because it's awesome?
ascorbic 11y ago
There was a post here just a few days ago about the difficulties in accessing the data from the BBC's Domesday Project just 30 years later. The original Domesday Book was written on vellum and copies have survived almost a millennium.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
J_Darnley 11y ago
Huh? It isn't any more. This was just changed (almost literally).
- ranko 11y ago
  The Cabinet Office has just offered to pay to maintain the tradition: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/15/lords-overruled-recording-laws-vellum-goat-calf-skin http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/15/lords-overru...
  - J_Darnley 11y ago
    Oh. I must commend the media for publicising that amendment to last week's big story so widely.
borkabrak 11y ago
This has really got me wondering: What would be a format that is fundamentally readable by both humans and computers? And what does that question really mean?
iolothebard 11y ago
Archiving isn't a one and done. Anyone that sells a single solution and doesn't have it including costs for migration over time have never dealt with data for very long or don't have any foresight at all.
convivialdingo 11y ago
First job out of college, I worked as a oil data digital archivist, recovering data from old tapes. The data was geological shot data (seismic data collected by blowing dynamite, ground thumping trucks and explosive gas ships). There are likely thousands of different combinations of hardware, data and formats that we could support. This was just from a 50 year period. I've no doubt that data rot is one of the hardest challenges for the future. If it's really important then you better put it on something physical that lasts.
vetrom 11y ago
It seems to me that a lot of the issues people are bringing up in relation to this story were handled in the age of vellum's primacy by orders of monks or the like? It would seem to me that the place to look for knowledge about digital archiving is those who have taken up that call in modern times, such as the American examples of ibiblio.org and archive.org. I'm fairly confident that there exist European equivalents, as well. Why not look to the research, as opposed to breathless naysaying? It's certainly not a solved problem, but it's definitely not one that's being handwaved away, either.

104 points by jjp 11y ago

lhnz 11y ago

I wonder what the maintenance costs would be to keep a digital document storage system running robustly and effectively for 800 years (as long as the Magna Carta document lasted)? (Not trying to imply that vellum should be the only storage method but that sounds like cheap robustness, and I'd not want to throw that away just because you want to be capital-D Digital.)

richmarr 11y ago
> Not trying to imply that vellum should be the only storage method but that sounds like cheap robustness Not to mention supporting the UK's tourism brand... castles and queens and whatnot.
- ranko 11y ago
  The documents discussed here are acts of parliament, which almost no-one (particularly tourists) will ever see once they've been stored in the tower.
  - richmarr 11y ago
    You're missing the distinction between brand & marketing there. The Situation Room is part of the Whitehouse's brand whether tourists get to see it or not.
    - neximo4 11y ago
      The other thing is it is real of course, the intent of it isn't for tourists, neither are the 'castles and queens' and the branding as you put it. Not saying it doesn't help tourism, its just not the intent of it all & doesn't have much bearing on the decisions being taken as much as the simple act of continuing traditions.
a-priori 11y ago
The closest equivalent I can think of immediately is Amazon Glacier, which is intended for 'long-term' storage where they take care of transferring the data as necessary to preserve its accessibility. Obviously they're thinking years-to-decades, not centuries, but as a ballpark it may work. Their current pricing is $0.0007 per GB-month, or $0.000064 per KB for 800 years in today's dollars. Since the Latin text of Magna Carta is 28 KB of UTF-8 text, that works out to $0.0018 to store the text for 800 years. You'd obviously also want a high-resolution scan of the original document. I don't know how big that would be. If it was a 100MB image, it would cost $6.66 to store for 800 years at Amazon's current Glacier prices. Obviously we're making immense assumptions about the reliability of the service, of price stability to deliver the quality of service, and so on. And perhaps the biggest issue with this analysis is that we're also relying on huge economies of scale for it to be profitable to deliver an archival service like this over centuries. If this sounds crazy cheap to you, you're not alone. As technologists we're used to dealing with huge volumes of data, so it's easy to forget that historically these volumes simply did not exist.
- vidarh 11y ago
  > Obviously we're making immense assumptions about the reliability of the service Even assuming the corporate entity will survive that long is dicey. To ensure survival of a document on such as service you can not just look at the cost of a storage service, but the cost of infrastructure to care for it. E.g. just the matter of keeping an organization alive for the duration to ensure an account is kept active and live and prepared to ensure each and every monthly bill is paid.
- brudgers 11y ago
  The Magna Carta survived wars and revolutions and changes of government and economic collapses and the Black Death. Glacier may struggle with a long electrical blackout.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
beejiu 11y ago
Given the government's history of failed and overbudget IT projects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_custom_software_projects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_failed_and_overbudget_...), probably billions of pounds for something that half works.
profmonocle 11y ago
Hard to say, considering tech will continue to evolve over that time. Who knows, 100 years from now we might have found an extremely reliable way to store digital information long-term, thus we'd only have to do the "copy from one medium to another" dance for a few generations. Or we might not.
chippy 11y ago
It would require a trust, a fund and a dedicated organisation, possibly using lawyers. Legal documents relating to land and titles have survived for hundreds of years in this manner. It's a social not a technological problem. But how to do it is much easier to solve. Why to do it is the actual problem. What to keep and when to keep it without knowing the future. How does anyone know that the 100 photos that a person from Morocco put onto Flickr 5 years ago would have value in the future? Why should those be archived? In 200 years these photos could be immensely valuable. How can this potential future value ensure the archiving of the photos today? Is there economics for this?
avani 11y ago
Our research group is looking at this exact question, and it turns out that there are several factors that effect the balance between cost and reliability/longevity in an archive. Paper: http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/gupta-mascots14.pdf http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/Papers/gupta-mascots14.pdf

forinti 11y ago

Are they still "printed" by hand? I couldn't find any details.

Someone1234 11y ago
Nope. They print them via an normal computer printer, using A4 sheets of vellum e.g. https://i.imgur.com/xyXBBln.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xyXBBln.jpg The end result is almost indistinguishable from the paper version of the same, unless you touch it.
- detaro 11y ago
  I wonder if there is any data on the reliability of the used printer ink.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    I was thinking the same thing. I couldn't find anything when I googled it.
  - aristus 11y ago
    If it's laser toner, then it's resin and carbon fused to the page at a high heat. Carbon is an element so can't fade, and resin's only problem is ultraviolet. Pretty stable combo. I did a lot of research on this subject and concluded that acid-free rag + laser should last 500+ years. http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2010/09/paper-internet.html
    - michrassena 11y ago
      I didn't see your comment when I posted. Carbon seems like an ideal archival pigment in this case.
- michrassena 11y ago
  I'm assuming that they are using some kind of archival ink, but the real issue is how long the ink will last.

Someone1234 11y ago

Vellum works and has been proven to work for hundreds of years. Archival paper is interesting but largely unproven tech. On paper it works (no pun intended) but we really haven't seen if it will last even 200 years, and we should before we start printing our most treasured documents on it. Digital long term storage is just, no. Look, all key UK documents are ALREADY digital they're available to download right now. However we aren't talking about digital Vs. non-digital, we're talking about what to store BACKUPS on. Digital long term storage is something people who frankly know little about technology point to. It is up to IT-types to figure out the costs and the "how?" from then on out. There is no digital storage media which will still exist reliably in 200-400 years, not CDs, not HDDs, and not SSDs. Tapes are the closest and they won't last that long. So we aren't talking about slapping it on a CD and storing it in some archive, we're talking about slapping it on a piece of digital media today and then moving it every one hundred years without fail, or we lose it forever... If one government or generation loses interest then future generations suffer (see the current government as an example: moving away from reliable Vellum to unproven papers). Plus with digital you also have to worry about: solar flares/EMP, format knowledge (both of the file system & file format), media protocol knowledge (SATA or CDs might be forgotten technology), and the ability to alter historical documents without detection (not that vallum is immune, but it requires more skill/time). PS - The "Digital Preservation Coalition" are a group of historians and archivists. They aren't technologists, they just point blindly at digital without explaining the nitty gritty of HOW.

imprecision 11y ago
Entirely agree with you about the current lack of longer term stable data storage options. That said, waiting the full duration of a material's projected life span before actual use of that material would limit options hugely, especially with the massively increasing corpus of generated data. In this sort of context (amount of data) one can spread your bets and use vellum, as well as other methods, until other more stable forms of storage are easily available. Interesting piece released yesterday related to long term data storage; a projected lifespan of 13.8 billion years doesn't sound too bad... University of Southampton - http://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-update.page http://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/02/5d-data-storage-up...

CapitalistCartr 11y ago

There is no such medium as digital. Digital is the encoding method. All media have a lifespan, a certain durability. That determines its future survivability. A digital format could be coded onto vellum, but plain text is more reliable. This is the typical enthusiasm for "technology" by leaders who know only how to get re-elected.

rileymat2 11y ago
This message has been brought to you by the office of pedantry: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/digital http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/digital 5. available in electronic form; readable and manipulable by computer: Scan these two pages so you'll have them as a digital document.
- Vivtek 11y ago
  It's not pedantry. "Digital" says nothing about the physical medium, which is a crucial issue if what you're talking about is the viability of long-term archives. Much better to say "magnetic" or "optical" or what have you, but merely to say "It's the 21st century, we should be digital now!" marks an argument as poorly considered.
- ethagknight 11y ago
  You picked out #5 of 11 distinct definitions for digital, several of which could apply here. Not pedantry to be more specific.
pdabbadabba 11y ago
This is a good point, for more reasons that mere pedantry. Describing storage methods as "digital" also encourages people two conflate two equally important but distinct concerns: 1. Durability of the physical medium over long periods of time, and 2. Our ability to decode extract information from the media even if they do physically survive. (I remember this being a hot issue several years ago, but one that seems to have faded a bit recently.)

ape4 11y ago

Well, for one its kind of cool.

jameslk 11y ago

The next Rosetta Stone will have to translate one filesystem to another.

rusanu 11y ago

Reminds me of the 'leafs' from Anathem[0]. for sure none of the current digital storage artifacts will be readable in +500 years, like scrolls. Contiguous upgrade required by digital will always have a cost and only 'certain' items will end up surviving, where the criteria for choosing will vary with fashion, religion, politics. Wonder is archaeologist in 2500 CE will reveal "500 years old file discovered in digital archives" and then, year later, announce the succesful decoding of an original cca. 2016 animated cat GIF... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem

rtkwe 11y ago
Anathem was inspired by the Long Now which is trying to build the 10,000 year Clock and Library. They've been doing a lot of work to try to preserve things for that long. One attempt is the Rosetta Project which is text and info on 1500 languages in 13000 pages etched and electroformed onto a nickle platter. [1] [1] http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

fimbaz 11y ago

Without reading the article, maybe... because it's awesome?

ascorbic 11y ago

There was a post here just a few days ago about the difficulties in accessing the data from the BBC's Domesday Project just 30 years later. The original Domesday Book was written on vellum and copies have survived almost a millennium.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

J_Darnley 11y ago

Huh? It isn't any more. This was just changed (almost literally).

ranko 11y ago
The Cabinet Office has just offered to pay to maintain the tradition: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/15/lords-overruled-recording-laws-vellum-goat-calf-skin http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/15/lords-overru...
- J_Darnley 11y ago
  Oh. I must commend the media for publicising that amendment to last week's big story so widely.

borkabrak 11y ago

This has really got me wondering: What would be a format that is fundamentally readable by both humans and computers? And what does that question really mean?

iolothebard 11y ago

Archiving isn't a one and done. Anyone that sells a single solution and doesn't have it including costs for migration over time have never dealt with data for very long or don't have any foresight at all.

convivialdingo 11y ago

First job out of college, I worked as a oil data digital archivist, recovering data from old tapes. The data was geological shot data (seismic data collected by blowing dynamite, ground thumping trucks and explosive gas ships). There are likely thousands of different combinations of hardware, data and formats that we could support. This was just from a 50 year period. I've no doubt that data rot is one of the hardest challenges for the future. If it's really important then you better put it on something physical that lasts.

vetrom 11y ago

It seems to me that a lot of the issues people are bringing up in relation to this story were handled in the age of vellum's primacy by orders of monks or the like? It would seem to me that the place to look for knowledge about digital archiving is those who have taken up that call in modern times, such as the American examples of ibiblio.org and archive.org. I'm fairly confident that there exist European equivalents, as well. Why not look to the research, as opposed to breathless naysaying? It's certainly not a solved problem, but it's definitely not one that's being handwaved away, either.