Papercuts
October 15, 2023 4:21 AM Subscribe
A cut too far: at BBC Future, Chris Baraniuk writes about "the people who can't give up paper". Among those trying but failing to give it up: the UK's NHS. Lindsay Clark at The Register bemoans their 'abysmal efforts to go paperless'. In the U.S., meanwhile, the IRS has every intention of going paperless, aiming "to achieve paperless processing for all tax returns by filing season 2025". Paper & print industry body Two Sides ask "Is Going Paperless Really Better for the Environment?" While at UNCTAD, Yann Duval et al, attempting to quantify "the environmental benefits from paperless trade facilitation" answer that it often is.
I've worked in so many offices where the end goal was to become "paperless" by X date. While I want to laud the idea, the fact is the actual effort to make an office paperless is often left to the lower level workers while the 6 figure manager and/or owners boast to clients about how soon they will be a paperless office. Managers often have no idea about the volume of decades of actual files or papers there are. A lot of them definitely participate in magical thinking.
posted by Kitteh at 4:38 AM on October 15, 2023 [19 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 4:38 AM on October 15, 2023 [19 favorites]
Every effort to make an office paperless inevitably leads to even more paper being used.
posted by jmauro at 4:42 AM on October 15, 2023 [12 favorites]
posted by jmauro at 4:42 AM on October 15, 2023 [12 favorites]
Going paperless tends to destroy archiving practices in smaller organizations.
posted by Miko at 5:15 AM on October 15, 2023 [30 favorites]
posted by Miko at 5:15 AM on October 15, 2023 [30 favorites]
The records that are digital-only may as well be gone, for the purposes of everyone except the primary source.
Like, with my financial results online only, it's harder for me to compare past results. Or when an organization goes out of business or I lose my affiliation with them, the entire history just disappears.
That's true on a personal level as well as the macro level, and I find it really disquieting.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:31 AM on October 15, 2023 [11 favorites]
Like, with my financial results online only, it's harder for me to compare past results. Or when an organization goes out of business or I lose my affiliation with them, the entire history just disappears.
That's true on a personal level as well as the macro level, and I find it really disquieting.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:31 AM on October 15, 2023 [11 favorites]
We assume that paperless is better. Why? For any number of contexts and archival purposes, closed digital standards cause more problems than they solve - lack of interoperability, insecurity, etc etc. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it, but we need to interrogate our assumptions
posted by tinlids at 5:57 AM on October 15, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by tinlids at 5:57 AM on October 15, 2023 [6 favorites]
The records that are digital-only may as well be gone, for the purposes of everyone except the primary source.
That’s due to bad practices rather than anything inherent to the digital realm. IME a huge part of the annoyance is due to the magical thinking managers and smaller org archiving practices mentioned above.
Most people’s paper records sucked too, but at least the physical copy was probably in a file box somewhere. Then nobody was trained to even create the digital version of that file box, or how to dump an important shot of a web interface to pdf, etc. etc. The workers trained on paper records are aging out of the workforce, leaving digital records that often consist of like, a Google Drive folder with no lower-level organization. And many digital natives have been trained that all information is ephemeral and easily found again.
More work for archivists I guess.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:58 AM on October 15, 2023 [9 favorites]
That’s due to bad practices rather than anything inherent to the digital realm. IME a huge part of the annoyance is due to the magical thinking managers and smaller org archiving practices mentioned above.
Most people’s paper records sucked too, but at least the physical copy was probably in a file box somewhere. Then nobody was trained to even create the digital version of that file box, or how to dump an important shot of a web interface to pdf, etc. etc. The workers trained on paper records are aging out of the workforce, leaving digital records that often consist of like, a Google Drive folder with no lower-level organization. And many digital natives have been trained that all information is ephemeral and easily found again.
More work for archivists I guess.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:58 AM on October 15, 2023 [9 favorites]
That’s due to bad practices rather than anything inherent to the digital realm.
ehhh, kinda sorta. "Best practices" in the digital realm is such a hand-wavey way of blaming users, when the problem is the digital realm itself, and its unending need for backups, migrations, reformatting, backups of the backups, backward compatibility, etc. etc. That's a ton of recurring financial investment, not to mention people-power to maintain. Fall behind on any of those and the technorati will scream "best practices!!!" at you. Of course, "best practices" is also a moving target, ever in the thrall of the tech-du-jour. More work for IT, I guess.
Paper files will outlive any digital file by a very, very wide margin, and not require anything more than light to be read.
..........
And many digital natives have been trained that all information is ephemeral and easily found again.
This is the true failure to follow "best practices."
posted by Thorzdad at 6:59 AM on October 15, 2023 [16 favorites]
ehhh, kinda sorta. "Best practices" in the digital realm is such a hand-wavey way of blaming users, when the problem is the digital realm itself, and its unending need for backups, migrations, reformatting, backups of the backups, backward compatibility, etc. etc. That's a ton of recurring financial investment, not to mention people-power to maintain. Fall behind on any of those and the technorati will scream "best practices!!!" at you. Of course, "best practices" is also a moving target, ever in the thrall of the tech-du-jour. More work for IT, I guess.
Paper files will outlive any digital file by a very, very wide margin, and not require anything more than light to be read.
..........
And many digital natives have been trained that all information is ephemeral and easily found again.
This is the true failure to follow "best practices."
posted by Thorzdad at 6:59 AM on October 15, 2023 [16 favorites]
Digital storage creeps me out at a deep level. I use it but I don’t trust it. And that lack of trust is corrosive.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:04 AM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:04 AM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]
My office went paperless decades ago, and all digital records are easy to find and access in the database that was set up to hold them. The older paper records are awful to get at though. Beyond a certain date they are archived and require Herculean efforts to get at. Fortunately we rarely have any reason to have to get at them. There still was dribs and drabs of paper going around, especially with upper management until we finally moved to digital signatures and then COVID was the final nail. No one prints out anything anymore. We still have a printer room on each floor, but they gather dust.
I would never want to go back to the days of chasing folders of paper around. Good riddance.
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:14 AM on October 15, 2023 [6 favorites]
I would never want to go back to the days of chasing folders of paper around. Good riddance.
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:14 AM on October 15, 2023 [6 favorites]
I am a special collections curator whose department is pre-1800 books and manuscripts, so nearly everything in my collection is written on either parchment or rag-fiber paper, two of the most durable substrates around. To succeed at the part of my job that is ensuring these materials persist for the future, I don’t have to do much more than give them a dry place to sleep. And to do the part of my job that is making them accessible to researchers, I don’t have to do much more than plop them on a table and say “here you go!”*
If I were responsible for the problem of “How do I serve a 5 1/4” floppy to a reader in 2050” I think I’d never get a good night’s sleep again.
*Obviously I am wildly oversimplifying to highlight the contrast.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:21 AM on October 15, 2023 [19 favorites]
If I were responsible for the problem of “How do I serve a 5 1/4” floppy to a reader in 2050” I think I’d never get a good night’s sleep again.
*Obviously I am wildly oversimplifying to highlight the contrast.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:21 AM on October 15, 2023 [19 favorites]
In the paper days, secretarial training was all that was needed to create a workable corporate archive. What happened with digital were multiple changes that seem small but actually made it far harder for anyone without specialized digital archiving training to manage. One was that the balance -to-many to one-to-one communications shifted as the effort involved in one-to-one communication dropped. Departmental newsletters with meaningful chronicle content have vanished from many small orgs. Hiring, disciplinary, and firing paperwork is now moving between the parties directly involved, maybe to an HR record if you’re in luck. In the absence of a rigorous digital policy and training for all staff it’s tremendously difficult for people to determine what should be archived and what is unnecessary. Twin problems of saving way too many duplicative and unimportant digital files and at the other end, not spotting the need to save pivotal communications or things that reflect a daily practice. Then the sloppy habits of untrained staff who store important things on their personal cloud drives and email accounts. Al this was much, much easier for a small org to deal with. When I worked in a museum with an archives we just made an extra copy of everything informative with “archives” on the distribution list. The executive secretary put them in the institutional files. Today they’ve virtually stopped collecting archival material. No one has the training to do this right and it’s not something that org can afford.
posted by Miko at 7:26 AM on October 15, 2023 [12 favorites]
posted by Miko at 7:26 AM on October 15, 2023 [12 favorites]
My office situation is mostly paperless in that very little of what I generate or work on will be printed. For some things, there will be one or two paper sets printed up at the very end for submittal, but no one will have printed up multiple drafts along the way.
My biggest personal use of paper is in taking notes on 8.5x11 notepads. I have not found a better way of taking notes for myself, especially for calls/video calls where I am an active participant and presenting. If I am just a background person, typing notes on the send screen works, but that stops working when my role requires bringing up things on both screens and actively managing things. So I still take notes on paper and probably will until someone developes the perfect tablet based approach.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:35 AM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]
My biggest personal use of paper is in taking notes on 8.5x11 notepads. I have not found a better way of taking notes for myself, especially for calls/video calls where I am an active participant and presenting. If I am just a background person, typing notes on the send screen works, but that stops working when my role requires bringing up things on both screens and actively managing things. So I still take notes on paper and probably will until someone developes the perfect tablet based approach.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:35 AM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]
About a decade ago I worked on a project to scan and digitise a large office stacked to the roof with paper. It all went to plan but within about 7 years the costs of running the software had risen to the point it would have been cheaper to buy another office and print everything out again.
We did migrate to a different/cheaper solution but it does show that you can't just forget about digital archives the way you can with paper.
posted by Lanark at 7:36 AM on October 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
We did migrate to a different/cheaper solution but it does show that you can't just forget about digital archives the way you can with paper.
posted by Lanark at 7:36 AM on October 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
We assume that paperless is better. Why?
Because we don’t want millions of trees cut down unnecessarily?
posted by Phanx at 7:55 AM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
Because we don’t want millions of trees cut down unnecessarily?
posted by Phanx at 7:55 AM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
Because we don’t want millions of trees cut down unnecessarily?
I've never quite understood that specific concern. We know how to grow more trees - they're a renewable resource.
posted by ElKevbo at 8:00 AM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]
I've never quite understood that specific concern. We know how to grow more trees - they're a renewable resource.
posted by ElKevbo at 8:00 AM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]
it s also the paper mills that cause cancer and poverty
and the soils you cant get back, which are more and more degraded with time
posted by eustatic at 8:02 AM on October 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
and the soils you cant get back, which are more and more degraded with time
posted by eustatic at 8:02 AM on October 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
not to mention the piles of black liquor sludge waste from the paper mills that used to just be dumped in the river. those sludge piles are now put into "land application", which I think is better? it sits on a hill and composts, sort of. and only leaches into the river a little bit.
all of this happens in the south part of the united states, in rural areas. so i guess, yeah. it's fine. sure. International Paper has threatened to close all the mills and move to Brazil if EPA tries to make them clean up the waste according to law. So EPA gave up on dealing with the mill waste.
I mean, i would like to learn about archival solutions that could help, rather than deal with more mill waste piles. please.
posted by eustatic at 8:09 AM on October 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
all of this happens in the south part of the united states, in rural areas. so i guess, yeah. it's fine. sure. International Paper has threatened to close all the mills and move to Brazil if EPA tries to make them clean up the waste according to law. So EPA gave up on dealing with the mill waste.
I mean, i would like to learn about archival solutions that could help, rather than deal with more mill waste piles. please.
posted by eustatic at 8:09 AM on October 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
And to do the part of my job that is making them accessible to researchers, I don’t have to do much more than plop them on a table and say “here you go!”*
Not trying to disagree so much as to zoom out. There's probably a word for this, but I don't know what it is - the idea that the expense or effort involved in an action is going to be borne by one side or another, and that greater ease or efficiency for one side often translate to greater difficulty or costs for the other.
So the archivist or librarian can just plop a book in front of the researcher... But on the researcher's side, they have to live near the archive, or travel to it, and in the latter case make living arrangements in the area, which often necessitates extra grant money; and only one researcher can access a resource at a time; and if the researcher is like me and has trouble actually sitting upright in a library for any length of time, or is otherwise handicapped, that's too bad; and if the researcher needs to make copies, that is a laborious, expensive, and sometimes disallowed process; and so on and so forth.
There are a lot of advantages and disadvantages to both paper and digital, but to understand overall costs or benefits we've got to look at all the sides involved.
posted by trig at 8:21 AM on October 15, 2023 [9 favorites]
Not trying to disagree so much as to zoom out. There's probably a word for this, but I don't know what it is - the idea that the expense or effort involved in an action is going to be borne by one side or another, and that greater ease or efficiency for one side often translate to greater difficulty or costs for the other.
So the archivist or librarian can just plop a book in front of the researcher... But on the researcher's side, they have to live near the archive, or travel to it, and in the latter case make living arrangements in the area, which often necessitates extra grant money; and only one researcher can access a resource at a time; and if the researcher is like me and has trouble actually sitting upright in a library for any length of time, or is otherwise handicapped, that's too bad; and if the researcher needs to make copies, that is a laborious, expensive, and sometimes disallowed process; and so on and so forth.
There are a lot of advantages and disadvantages to both paper and digital, but to understand overall costs or benefits we've got to look at all the sides involved.
posted by trig at 8:21 AM on October 15, 2023 [9 favorites]
I remember when our college admissions office transitioned to paperless.
We used to devote probably 300 sq ft full of floor to ceiling flipping shelves to storing that year’s freshman class. Two or three people were devoted to sorting admissions mail and matching it with applications. There were probably 10 people who spent all day in windowless rooms silently entering the paper application information into our ancient database.
Reading college applications meant hauling around 15-20lbs of paper to wherever you wanted to read those files. You could tell that someone was transferring from a college that issued narrative transcripts by how thick their paper file was.
You could easily spend an hour inter-filing your applications back with the main stack of files. Woe to you if you misplaced or misfiled an application. We had a specific person who would spend hours hunting down a rogue file.
We kept enrolled students records for three years in a dank storage room somewhere, and then scanned to microfiche.
Our first crack at a paperless system wasn’t that great - weird software, unintuitive virtual forms, cranky server with capacity issues, paper scanners that broke all the time.
Once most of the college admissions industry transitioned to electronic delivery of materials, things got a lot easier. Newer software was a blessing, too.
posted by WedgedPiano at 8:22 AM on October 15, 2023 [7 favorites]
We used to devote probably 300 sq ft full of floor to ceiling flipping shelves to storing that year’s freshman class. Two or three people were devoted to sorting admissions mail and matching it with applications. There were probably 10 people who spent all day in windowless rooms silently entering the paper application information into our ancient database.
Reading college applications meant hauling around 15-20lbs of paper to wherever you wanted to read those files. You could tell that someone was transferring from a college that issued narrative transcripts by how thick their paper file was.
You could easily spend an hour inter-filing your applications back with the main stack of files. Woe to you if you misplaced or misfiled an application. We had a specific person who would spend hours hunting down a rogue file.
We kept enrolled students records for three years in a dank storage room somewhere, and then scanned to microfiche.
Our first crack at a paperless system wasn’t that great - weird software, unintuitive virtual forms, cranky server with capacity issues, paper scanners that broke all the time.
Once most of the college admissions industry transitioned to electronic delivery of materials, things got a lot easier. Newer software was a blessing, too.
posted by WedgedPiano at 8:22 AM on October 15, 2023 [7 favorites]
I am deeply embedded in the digital recordkbeeping business -- it's likely you use at least one aspect of our technology several to hundreds of times a day, if you interact with documents that aren't on paper -- and the answer, like always, is "blame the user," but the definition of "user" isn't some poor officeperson sitting at their desk.
With paper, "blame the user" applies: at an individual level, recordkbeeping practices are abysmal, ranging at one end from paper hoarding of ephemeral junk mail that unintentionally raises the noise floor beyond reason; to no records at all: people who just cross their fingers and hope that they'll remember the account number they need. Many people fall somewhere in a middle range bounded by "some of the wrong stuff, incomplete" at one end, and "wasn't really keeping track of that" at the other.
At an institutional level, it's just about the same: some things are at least semi well-tracked because there's a process associated with them, and everything else is kinda in a morass of who knows what the fuck is going on; other institutions are impeccable, with slowly disintegrating practices as those with recordkbeeping training fall out of the workforce.
With digital and partially-digital practices, the user is still the one fucking up: they're treating digital documents like pieces of paper, "printing" things out into a file from software that assumes a mechanical device is involved somewhere on the other end of a make-believe IEEE-1284-like parallel port, putting those files in a virtual "place," and hoping praying assuming that the virtual "place" is still there when they go back to find it. Sometimes, the user buys a service or a piece of software to paper over their bad practices, in hopes that technology solves their process problem, that spending money on a product fixes their fundamental misconceptions, but... it doesn't, just like always.
The operating system is bad, the office software is bad, the archival system is bad, the practices are bad, the assumptions on the part of the people deciding what the end user should be doing are bad, the assumptions on the part of the people selling all this stuff are bad. The existence of the PDF standard and "enterprise" (hah!) storage solutions does nothing to solve the actual problem at hand. Slap on a bunch of capitalist middlemen with their SaaS hands out at every layer of abstraction, and the cost of digital transformation starts to look daunting over the long haul. A piece of paper doesn't have an S3 bill due every month.
Doing this right requires reframing so much. It goes all the way down to unwinding how we treat most of the computers involved in this chain as though they're 8080 CP/M machines with 40 years of "don't break assumptions" accreted on top of them. It goes all the way down to letting people own the machines they use, and not charging them for those machines existing.
Digital recordkbeeping is a super hard problem to solve, and Buying a Thing and then having a lot of meetings is not how you solve it. You're doing it wrong.
posted by majick at 8:24 AM on October 15, 2023 [7 favorites]
With paper, "blame the user" applies: at an individual level, recordkbeeping practices are abysmal, ranging at one end from paper hoarding of ephemeral junk mail that unintentionally raises the noise floor beyond reason; to no records at all: people who just cross their fingers and hope that they'll remember the account number they need. Many people fall somewhere in a middle range bounded by "some of the wrong stuff, incomplete" at one end, and "wasn't really keeping track of that" at the other.
At an institutional level, it's just about the same: some things are at least semi well-tracked because there's a process associated with them, and everything else is kinda in a morass of who knows what the fuck is going on; other institutions are impeccable, with slowly disintegrating practices as those with recordkbeeping training fall out of the workforce.
With digital and partially-digital practices, the user is still the one fucking up: they're treating digital documents like pieces of paper, "printing" things out into a file from software that assumes a mechanical device is involved somewhere on the other end of a make-believe IEEE-1284-like parallel port, putting those files in a virtual "place," and hoping praying assuming that the virtual "place" is still there when they go back to find it. Sometimes, the user buys a service or a piece of software to paper over their bad practices, in hopes that technology solves their process problem, that spending money on a product fixes their fundamental misconceptions, but... it doesn't, just like always.
The operating system is bad, the office software is bad, the archival system is bad, the practices are bad, the assumptions on the part of the people deciding what the end user should be doing are bad, the assumptions on the part of the people selling all this stuff are bad. The existence of the PDF standard and "enterprise" (hah!) storage solutions does nothing to solve the actual problem at hand. Slap on a bunch of capitalist middlemen with their SaaS hands out at every layer of abstraction, and the cost of digital transformation starts to look daunting over the long haul. A piece of paper doesn't have an S3 bill due every month.
Doing this right requires reframing so much. It goes all the way down to unwinding how we treat most of the computers involved in this chain as though they're 8080 CP/M machines with 40 years of "don't break assumptions" accreted on top of them. It goes all the way down to letting people own the machines they use, and not charging them for those machines existing.
Digital recordkbeeping is a super hard problem to solve, and Buying a Thing and then having a lot of meetings is not how you solve it. You're doing it wrong.
posted by majick at 8:24 AM on October 15, 2023 [7 favorites]
making paper harms workers and ecosystems
making computer components harms workers and ecosystems
posted by aniola at 9:15 AM on October 15, 2023 [6 favorites]
making computer components harms workers and ecosystems
posted by aniola at 9:15 AM on October 15, 2023 [6 favorites]
There are a lot of advantages and disadvantages to both paper and digital, but to understand overall costs or benefits we've got to look at all the sides involved.
Oh, gosh, digitizing physical collections for researchers who can’t visit our reading room is a huge part of our work these days—it became the sole part when we were closed by the pandemic and it hardly feels like demand has slowed down. Of course figuring out how to preserve those images for reuse is a separate challenge on top of the challenge of what we call “born digital” collections like the aforementioned floppy.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:38 AM on October 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
Oh, gosh, digitizing physical collections for researchers who can’t visit our reading room is a huge part of our work these days—it became the sole part when we were closed by the pandemic and it hardly feels like demand has slowed down. Of course figuring out how to preserve those images for reuse is a separate challenge on top of the challenge of what we call “born digital” collections like the aforementioned floppy.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:38 AM on October 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
I went in to an IRS office for an appointment a while back. The agent we spoke with was using a terminal program to connect to a monochrome text-based database UI. Good luck with that modernization.
(And since it’s the season for scary stories: the IRS simply lost the record of all of my W2 withholding for 2021 and sent me a letter saying I had to pay it all again.)
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:51 AM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
(And since it’s the season for scary stories: the IRS simply lost the record of all of my W2 withholding for 2021 and sent me a letter saying I had to pay it all again.)
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:51 AM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
The agent we spoke with was using a terminal program to connect to a monochrome text-based database UI.
Honestly, for that kind of tool, I don't think a better interface has ever been invented. Keyboard-only is fast. The tradeoff is that it's a bit slower and less intuitive to learn, but that's a price I'd gladly pay for a tool I'm going to use every day.
posted by aws17576 at 12:11 PM on October 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
Honestly, for that kind of tool, I don't think a better interface has ever been invented. Keyboard-only is fast. The tradeoff is that it's a bit slower and less intuitive to learn, but that's a price I'd gladly pay for a tool I'm going to use every day.
posted by aws17576 at 12:11 PM on October 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
When I started working at the company where I still work, back in 2011, the website claimed the company was paperless. Imagine my surprise when one of my first assigned tasks was printing out huge packs of documents for executive meetings.
It's a lot closer to the truth now (hotdesking & remote/hybrid meetings since the pandemic have forced a lot of what used to be printed to be shared digitally instead), but still not 100% true.
posted by terretu at 12:57 PM on October 15, 2023
It's a lot closer to the truth now (hotdesking & remote/hybrid meetings since the pandemic have forced a lot of what used to be printed to be shared digitally instead), but still not 100% true.
posted by terretu at 12:57 PM on October 15, 2023
I am so grateful my company is paperless. I couldn’t work remotely otherwise.
posted by samthemander at 1:49 PM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by samthemander at 1:49 PM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
I once worked for a website that went on and on for years about the advantages of a paperless office and how great it was for the environment, and how they were working toward that. Then it was bought by a new company, and we had to redo our employment contracts. I am a thousand miles from the office, and they wanted me to drop in and sign papers. On the phone with my supervisor, I mentioned how I would go to the library to print that off, and he said "You don't have a printer?" No, I don't. I don't want to buy a printer, ink, and paper, especially when my kids would blow through it all and I really don't need to print anything that often. He was aghast. "You've achieved the paperless office!"
Apparently the company had never made the first move toward that goal they lauded. Well, it was a magazine, and soon after the new owners took over, they went out of print.
posted by Miss Cellania at 5:30 PM on October 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Apparently the company had never made the first move toward that goal they lauded. Well, it was a magazine, and soon after the new owners took over, they went out of print.
posted by Miss Cellania at 5:30 PM on October 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
We assume that paperless is better. Why?
I work in an area where we need to deal with a lot of ephemeral publications: consultant's reports, corporate "learnings" and NGO white papers. In the paper days, you had to know a) that the document existed at all, b) who to approach within the organization to get a copy and c) that they still had copies and hadn't thrown them out or given them all away. My workplace has been collecting these things for forty years or so. In most cases, we possibly have the only publicly accessible versions left.
In particular, I've known that one professor friend of mine had been looking for a consultant report from the early 1990s. He knew it had existed at one point. He had seen it. The company that commissioned it had been sold and resold again. No corporate memory remained. No one was absolutely sure which consulting firm had been engaged, and in any case, the environmental consulting firms have seen extreme consolidation in the past two decades. We knew one of our folks had a copy at one point, but no one knew who particularly had been given a copy or where they had filed it. Or if it had been disposed of since, post-retirement.
After a major push to look through all the boxes of our retired colleagues and former bosses, we found it in the papers of an officer who had retired ten years previously and who had been stationed in a remote-work satellite office. Thankfully his papers hadn't been thrown out and we were able to track them down. And sure enough he had a copy of this 300 page report stashed away, complete with good quality copies of the original photographs.
We digitized it immediately, of course, and have been talking to our information management library colleagues about how we preserve our "grey literature" library better. Stuff from the late nineties on is in pretty good shape. Some of it is in older formats, but ones amenable to being converted to at least PDFs. It's the stuff that predates that that we have holes in, and sometimes holes we don't even know we ahve holes in.
A digital copy I can flip to my professor friend almost instantly. A paper report took literally years to find, and we got lucky we did even then.
posted by bonehead at 8:08 PM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]
I work in an area where we need to deal with a lot of ephemeral publications: consultant's reports, corporate "learnings" and NGO white papers. In the paper days, you had to know a) that the document existed at all, b) who to approach within the organization to get a copy and c) that they still had copies and hadn't thrown them out or given them all away. My workplace has been collecting these things for forty years or so. In most cases, we possibly have the only publicly accessible versions left.
In particular, I've known that one professor friend of mine had been looking for a consultant report from the early 1990s. He knew it had existed at one point. He had seen it. The company that commissioned it had been sold and resold again. No corporate memory remained. No one was absolutely sure which consulting firm had been engaged, and in any case, the environmental consulting firms have seen extreme consolidation in the past two decades. We knew one of our folks had a copy at one point, but no one knew who particularly had been given a copy or where they had filed it. Or if it had been disposed of since, post-retirement.
After a major push to look through all the boxes of our retired colleagues and former bosses, we found it in the papers of an officer who had retired ten years previously and who had been stationed in a remote-work satellite office. Thankfully his papers hadn't been thrown out and we were able to track them down. And sure enough he had a copy of this 300 page report stashed away, complete with good quality copies of the original photographs.
We digitized it immediately, of course, and have been talking to our information management library colleagues about how we preserve our "grey literature" library better. Stuff from the late nineties on is in pretty good shape. Some of it is in older formats, but ones amenable to being converted to at least PDFs. It's the stuff that predates that that we have holes in, and sometimes holes we don't even know we ahve holes in.
A digital copy I can flip to my professor friend almost instantly. A paper report took literally years to find, and we got lucky we did even then.
posted by bonehead at 8:08 PM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]
making paper harms workers and ecosystems
making computer components harms workers and f
Ecosystems
+Supplying vast server farms with the energy required to maintain our information systems by burning extracted fossil fuels harms workers and ecosystems
A paper report took literally years to find, and we got lucky we did even then
And you found it and it was intact, readable and uncorrupted. Any digital systems in place at the time of creation weee incapable providing this outcome. The stability of paper is remarkable.
posted by Miko at 8:55 PM on October 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
making computer components harms workers and f
Ecosystems
+Supplying vast server farms with the energy required to maintain our information systems by burning extracted fossil fuels harms workers and ecosystems
A paper report took literally years to find, and we got lucky we did even then
And you found it and it was intact, readable and uncorrupted. Any digital systems in place at the time of creation weee incapable providing this outcome. The stability of paper is remarkable.
posted by Miko at 8:55 PM on October 15, 2023 [5 favorites]
Very rarely has information ever persevered in history because of the medium of its storage; it has persevered because people in many successive generations wanted it preserved, and so recopied it and recopied it. Digital information is no more delicate and ephemeral than DNA, some of which has survived almost perfectly over billions of years. In other words, I don’t think insisting on paper will work, nor, if it did, would it guarantee the preservation of anything.
posted by argybarg at 11:58 PM on October 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by argybarg at 11:58 PM on October 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
Digital-only ID for EU citizens after Brexit could lead to Windrush-style scandal, MPs warn. From the UK.
For the benefit of non-UK people, the Windrush scandal concerned people (mostly but not all of Caribbean origin) who were wrongly detained, threatened with deportation, and in some cases deported or refused re-entry to the UK when they had residence here, or who had come as British subjects when Commonwealth citizens had the right to do so. The laws have changed significantly in the intervening decades, and the government's 'hostile environment', requiring paperwork often of elderly people which didn't even exist when they settled legally in the UK, when caseworkers have long lost the historical and institutional knowledge to deal with such cases appropriately, led to a culture of abuse with in some cases irreparable consequences.
Having a paper document can help defend against such government abuses. The drive to paperlessness - refusing a permanent, tangible document to other groups with right of settlement in the UK (in this case EU citizens, though other documents proving residence are due go to digital soon) - is another Windrush in the making.
I'm sure that this applies to other branches of government as well, in many countries.
posted by plep at 3:34 AM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
For the benefit of non-UK people, the Windrush scandal concerned people (mostly but not all of Caribbean origin) who were wrongly detained, threatened with deportation, and in some cases deported or refused re-entry to the UK when they had residence here, or who had come as British subjects when Commonwealth citizens had the right to do so. The laws have changed significantly in the intervening decades, and the government's 'hostile environment', requiring paperwork often of elderly people which didn't even exist when they settled legally in the UK, when caseworkers have long lost the historical and institutional knowledge to deal with such cases appropriately, led to a culture of abuse with in some cases irreparable consequences.
Having a paper document can help defend against such government abuses. The drive to paperlessness - refusing a permanent, tangible document to other groups with right of settlement in the UK (in this case EU citizens, though other documents proving residence are due go to digital soon) - is another Windrush in the making.
I'm sure that this applies to other branches of government as well, in many countries.
posted by plep at 3:34 AM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
If the IRS is going to go all digital I hope that it isn't just another way for all the Intuit type parasites to enrich themselves. Currently there is no way for a taxpayer to e-file except going through some vendor. The mailed in form, (prohibited in some states,) is the last bastion of democratic access.
posted by Pembquist at 7:23 AM on October 16, 2023
posted by Pembquist at 7:23 AM on October 16, 2023
Digital information is no more delicate and ephemeral than DNA
I don't know anything about DNA. But digital information requires something important: technology to read it, and frequent migration over changing technologies to access it. Paper doesn't need that. I can read a paper record written in some version of English from 500 years ago, but I can't read the hard drive from my first laptop without sourcing and paying for another machine to help me do it.
Migration is one the persistent issues for institutions that archive, or want to archive. It means having and maintaining the original equipment used to create the record, probably including spare parts and know-how to operate and fix it, and/or moving it to new formats whenever standards change.
posted by Miko at 7:51 AM on October 16, 2023 [4 favorites]
I don't know anything about DNA. But digital information requires something important: technology to read it, and frequent migration over changing technologies to access it. Paper doesn't need that. I can read a paper record written in some version of English from 500 years ago, but I can't read the hard drive from my first laptop without sourcing and paying for another machine to help me do it.
Migration is one the persistent issues for institutions that archive, or want to archive. It means having and maintaining the original equipment used to create the record, probably including spare parts and know-how to operate and fix it, and/or moving it to new formats whenever standards change.
posted by Miko at 7:51 AM on October 16, 2023 [4 favorites]
The existence of the PDF standard and "enterprise" (hah!) storage solutions does nothing to solve the actual problem at hand.
PDFs exist because there's no other way to ensure styled text and graphics can survive (and be legible) in another electronic format. Come up with a more open way to do that, and I'll gladly use it. PDF is a standard everyone hates because no one has ever made anything better.
posted by bonehead at 7:58 AM on October 16, 2023
PDFs exist because there's no other way to ensure styled text and graphics can survive (and be legible) in another electronic format. Come up with a more open way to do that, and I'll gladly use it. PDF is a standard everyone hates because no one has ever made anything better.
posted by bonehead at 7:58 AM on October 16, 2023
We are largely paperless at work, in part because they decided to keep a lot of practices that were adopted during the mandatory work-from-home era of 2020-22. Considering how backward and technologically averse my workplace tends to be, I find it remarkable.
On the other hand, our digital filing cabinets are all Google Workplace folders, which likely means ever shifting to a new service provider will be an absolute nightmare and I do not envy the archivists (or, more likely, front-line administrative and clerical staff) who will one day have to deal with this near inevitability.
Sharing permissions also mean that, potentially, a lot of files are locked away behind the accounts of just a handful of users who may or may not think to transfer ownership when they leave the organization (yes, IT can probably access all of this if it is vital to do so, but that still depends on someone realizing the files exist in the first place).
There are problems to be solved, for sure, and proprietary software is a big hurdle in future-proofing digital archives. But it's still so much better than one of the first companies I worked for after graduating from university, whose filing system included PRINTING EVERY REQUEST FOR QUOTE EMAIL, along with the quotes produced as a result of said request, and shoving them into a binder.
The sheer amount of paper we used to create in order to replicate electronic documents was, frankly, astounding and I don't even know where we stored anything more than a few years old, because it took up a lot of space and our building was not particularly large. The company must have either destroyed records after a certain length of time or rented off site storage.
The worst part is that we almost never referred back to these print-outs. It was just a thing we did because we had always done it and the bosses didn't want to change.
posted by asnider at 8:40 AM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
On the other hand, our digital filing cabinets are all Google Workplace folders, which likely means ever shifting to a new service provider will be an absolute nightmare and I do not envy the archivists (or, more likely, front-line administrative and clerical staff) who will one day have to deal with this near inevitability.
Sharing permissions also mean that, potentially, a lot of files are locked away behind the accounts of just a handful of users who may or may not think to transfer ownership when they leave the organization (yes, IT can probably access all of this if it is vital to do so, but that still depends on someone realizing the files exist in the first place).
There are problems to be solved, for sure, and proprietary software is a big hurdle in future-proofing digital archives. But it's still so much better than one of the first companies I worked for after graduating from university, whose filing system included PRINTING EVERY REQUEST FOR QUOTE EMAIL, along with the quotes produced as a result of said request, and shoving them into a binder.
The sheer amount of paper we used to create in order to replicate electronic documents was, frankly, astounding and I don't even know where we stored anything more than a few years old, because it took up a lot of space and our building was not particularly large. The company must have either destroyed records after a certain length of time or rented off site storage.
The worst part is that we almost never referred back to these print-outs. It was just a thing we did because we had always done it and the bosses didn't want to change.
posted by asnider at 8:40 AM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
digital information requires something important: technology to read it, and frequent migration over changing technologies to access it. Paper doesn't need that. I can read a paper record written in some version of English from 500 years ago
Thing is, we're so accustomed to the technologies that permit this apparent ease of reading that we can't imagine not having them. Reliable lighting for one; literacy for another. Paper distribution and storage mechanisms - not too much light; no moisture; pest control. Need specialist skills to read a style of handwriting or understand the meaning of some administrative document's layout and referencing? It may require a graduate program to keep those skills alive. The librarians and archivists here know all about the complexity of the systems that allow us to 'just read' a piece of paper, and they aren't cheap, nor are they any less fragile. We're just used to having them work, for now.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 12:48 PM on October 16, 2023 [4 favorites]
Thing is, we're so accustomed to the technologies that permit this apparent ease of reading that we can't imagine not having them. Reliable lighting for one; literacy for another. Paper distribution and storage mechanisms - not too much light; no moisture; pest control. Need specialist skills to read a style of handwriting or understand the meaning of some administrative document's layout and referencing? It may require a graduate program to keep those skills alive. The librarians and archivists here know all about the complexity of the systems that allow us to 'just read' a piece of paper, and they aren't cheap, nor are they any less fragile. We're just used to having them work, for now.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 12:48 PM on October 16, 2023 [4 favorites]
Indeed paper and it’s readability are technologies.. They’re just far, far more stable, and far more easily reproduced without any infrastructure, is the point.
posted by Miko at 7:30 AM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Miko at 7:30 AM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]
without any infrastructure
A staffed, well-lit, dry and secure library is infrastructure par excellence, and needs maintenance and care just like a server farm does.
We can discuss how much each costs - as does the linked article in the OP - but that's a difference of scale, not quality. The fact is that preserving either bytes or paper is a choice: paperless doesn't change this, but it does allow different kinds of outcome, as well as unanticipated costs and (sometimes) benefits.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 12:54 AM on October 18, 2023
A staffed, well-lit, dry and secure library is infrastructure par excellence, and needs maintenance and care just like a server farm does.
We can discuss how much each costs - as does the linked article in the OP - but that's a difference of scale, not quality. The fact is that preserving either bytes or paper is a choice: paperless doesn't change this, but it does allow different kinds of outcome, as well as unanticipated costs and (sometimes) benefits.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 12:54 AM on October 18, 2023
staffed, well-lit, dry and secure library is infrastructure
And it’s not necessary for accessing readable content. I can create a record for all time on the back of a paper bag. I can communicate with people a thousand years from now scratching on a wall with a key. I can teach someone to read with a stick and some dirt.
posted by Miko at 5:25 AM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]
And it’s not necessary for accessing readable content. I can create a record for all time on the back of a paper bag. I can communicate with people a thousand years from now scratching on a wall with a key. I can teach someone to read with a stick and some dirt.
posted by Miko at 5:25 AM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]
In general though, I agree that this is wrongly posed as an either/or when it’s a north/and. The ideal of paperlessness, though, ignores the challenges and deficits of total dependence on digital systems.
posted by Miko at 5:28 AM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Miko at 5:28 AM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]
Digital recordkbeeping is a super hard problem to solve, and Buying a Thing and then having a lot of meetings is not how you solve it. You're doing it wrong.
Your mouth to god's ears.
staffed, well-lit, dry and secure library is infrastructure
And wildy expensive infrastructure. I was in an multi-million-item collections facility just today in front of some hard numbers about this. As expensive as it is to maintain a giant warehouse of Harvard high-density storage at 60 degrees F and 40% ambient humidity, it's nearly 6:1 more expensive to store them in open stacks. Paper records don't necessarily require quite the same level of preservation care, but it ain't cheap.
And it’s not necessary for accessing readable content.
I think it kind of is though? "Necessary" might be too strong, but I've seen millennia-old versions of the low-tech kinds of information sharing you describe, and they're generally trotted out at least in part because of their rarity. When we're talking about things like office records, where the quality of the paper was generally shit to start with, paper records can get destroyed pretty easily. The stability of paper is indeed remarkable, but every record we keep is in a battle against entropy, regardless of its form.
The ideal of paperlessness, though, ignores the challenges and deficits of total dependence on digital systems.
Absolutely. It's not a panacea, and there's real harm being done by pretending going paperless only has positive consequences. That said, if I ever have to look at someone's accidental 40-copy printout of an email ever again I'm going to be very sad. I think your average white collar worker could handle nearly everything they do with a little more intentionality.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:44 PM on October 20, 2023
Your mouth to god's ears.
staffed, well-lit, dry and secure library is infrastructure
And wildy expensive infrastructure. I was in an multi-million-item collections facility just today in front of some hard numbers about this. As expensive as it is to maintain a giant warehouse of Harvard high-density storage at 60 degrees F and 40% ambient humidity, it's nearly 6:1 more expensive to store them in open stacks. Paper records don't necessarily require quite the same level of preservation care, but it ain't cheap.
And it’s not necessary for accessing readable content.
I think it kind of is though? "Necessary" might be too strong, but I've seen millennia-old versions of the low-tech kinds of information sharing you describe, and they're generally trotted out at least in part because of their rarity. When we're talking about things like office records, where the quality of the paper was generally shit to start with, paper records can get destroyed pretty easily. The stability of paper is indeed remarkable, but every record we keep is in a battle against entropy, regardless of its form.
The ideal of paperlessness, though, ignores the challenges and deficits of total dependence on digital systems.
Absolutely. It's not a panacea, and there's real harm being done by pretending going paperless only has positive consequences. That said, if I ever have to look at someone's accidental 40-copy printout of an email ever again I'm going to be very sad. I think your average white collar worker could handle nearly everything they do with a little more intentionality.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:44 PM on October 20, 2023
Come up with a more open way to do that, and I'll gladly use it. PDF is a standard everyone hates because no one has ever made anything better.
Let me assure you that I, and the people I work with, are absolutely positively not going to do that whatsoever. I'm quite a fan of PDF, actually. PDF will continue to get better in fact.
My "(hah!)" had more to do with the fact that what most people consider durable, reliable, accessible "enterprise grade" archival storage is anything but. Storing documents like sealed PDF on such systems is a dangerous game. Doing it properly is a technically hard problem -- just like properly creating, filing, archiving, and retrieving paper documents is -- but worth doing.
posted by majick at 11:38 AM on October 30, 2023
Let me assure you that I, and the people I work with, are absolutely positively not going to do that whatsoever. I'm quite a fan of PDF, actually. PDF will continue to get better in fact.
My "(hah!)" had more to do with the fact that what most people consider durable, reliable, accessible "enterprise grade" archival storage is anything but. Storing documents like sealed PDF on such systems is a dangerous game. Doing it properly is a technically hard problem -- just like properly creating, filing, archiving, and retrieving paper documents is -- but worth doing.
posted by majick at 11:38 AM on October 30, 2023
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posted by MtDewd at 4:32 AM on October 15, 2023