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South African Parliament’s Botched Digitisation May Mean Millions Of
Precious Documents Were Lost In The Fire
31 Jan 2022 9:07 AMAnonymous

The normal "rule of thumb" for preserving documents has long suggested
the best method of preserving documents is to digitize them. However,
recent experiences in South Africa show that digitization alone may
not be sufficient.

A project about five years ago was supposed to create a digital store
of the South African Parliament’s archive. But quality-control samples suggest that nearly half the pages were not scanned properly, and
there are troubling questions about how the project was managed,
especially by Parliament itself.

A botched digitisation project has probably condemned irreplaceable
documents to extinction following a recent fire in Parliament that
damaged or destroyed many paper documents. As a result of the fire
plus the improper digitization, many of South Africa's most important
legal documents are now lost forever.

No other store of archival material in the country has a copy. Of
particular importance are the annexures to the Hansard — the official
record of Parliament’s deliberations going back to 1910. The records
include unpublished government reports, annual reports, research, and manuscripts.

You can read more about this sad news at https://bit.ly/3IUWCAx.


--
Steve Hayes
Web: http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/
http://hayesgreene.blogspot.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/afgen/

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