In this week’s column I say my two cents’ worth
about the warehousing of State of Illinois documents, which is, pretty much,
that storing such documents on acid-free paper in a controlled environment of a
warehouse is probably the best solution, digitization being both more costly
and less reliably durable than print.
But there are storage media that
outdo paper. One is carving, say, child visitation records into wet
clay tablets that are then baked hard. No need for climate-controlled repositories, and impervious to bugs.
Another is writing them on calf skin, as
Chris Stokel-Walker recently reported in the BBC News
Magazine.
Last week the House of Lords decided to end the printing of
laws on vellum for cost reasons. But now the Cabinet Office is to provide the
money from its own budget for the thousand-year-old tradition to continue.Vellum lasts a long time. Dig into the archives of the UK’s
parliament and pull out the oldest extant law and you’ll find a very old document.
It was first inscribed in 1497.Over time, ordinary paper can deteriorate rapidly, while
vellum is said to retain its integrity for much longer. Original copies of the
Magna Carta, signed more than 800 years ago on vellum, still exist.
Impressive. But converting State of Illinois
archives to vellum would be a waste of money. The risk of electronic documents is that technological changes render them unreadable by future machines. But given the state of state school funding, ordinary printed English won’t be readable by humans in 800 years.
This article appears in Jun 8-14, 2017.
