Why is the UK still printing its laws on vellum?
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&#x27;t seen if it will last even 200 years, and we should before we start printing our most treasured documents on it.<p>Digital long term storage is just, no. Look, all key UK documents are ALREADY digital they&#x27;re available to download right now. However we aren&#x27;t talking about digital Vs. non-digital, we&#x27;re talking about what to store BACKUPS on.<p>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 &quot;how?&quot; 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&#x27;t last that long.<p>So we aren&#x27;t talking about slapping it on a CD and storing it in some archive, we&#x27;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).<p>Plus with digital you also have to worry about: solar flares&#x2F;EMP, format knowledge (both of the file system &amp; file format), media protocol knowledge (SATA or CDs might be forgotten technology), and the ability to alter historical documents without detection (not that vallum is immune, but it requires more skill&#x2F;time).<p>PS - The &quot;Digital Preservation Coalition&quot; are a group of historians and archivists. They aren&#x27;t technologists, they just point blindly at digital without explaining the nitty gritty of HOW.