"Adrian Bruce" <[email protected]> wrote : > <<snipped>> > And The National Archives can do a fully on-line wills facility and I can > only imagine it is economically viable, so why can't the Probate Registry > achieve the same. > <<snipped>> > > I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. TNA's online facility for wills > covers only the "Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 1383-1858", which must > >be a very small number by comparison with the post-1858 wills - and it's > a > fixed dataset. It seems to me that the future, if not the the present, is digital, so why can't government departments accept this and get on with digitisation projects ? > <<snipped>> > ... BMD certs. If people want a certified copy they can pay extra and have > it posted. > <<snipped>> > > Incidentally, I know you're not suggesting that the provision of > uncertified > copies would save money, but others do. Peter Calver of Lost Cousins, on > >the other hand, established that "the cost of the paper and printing is > just 16p > per certificate", so there's no massive potential by not putting that > stamp > on. Surely the real savings from digitisation of BMDs is in the saving of the labour and machinery needed to find, produce and send a paper copy through the post. Digitisation eliminates the bulk of the process - find the certificate on screen, attach it to an e-mail and send it. All done in 5 minutes. > <<snipped>> > A PPC deal with some private provider could finance [digitisation of BMD > certs]. ... This is a scandal of incompetence and probably staff hoarding > that needs opening up a bit. > <<snipped>> > > Very possibly. On the other hand, I've heard of no-one actually going to > government saying "Let's do it for you", suggesting there's no immediate > prospect of profit for anyone. Personally I doubt many Registrars want to > keep that much hold of the data - though some might. If you're set up to > record _today's_ registrations, then I'm sure the staffing levels will be > aimed at providing the contemporary legal and "professional" service, not > to > deal with family historians, so all this family history lark just plain > gets > in the way. > > It seems to me that no commercial provider like Ancestry would want to > produce a system that satisfied both family historians and current legal > requirements. What's needed is a cut-off (as per ScotlandsPeople) beyond > which the provider could just deal with family historians, rather than > trying to piggy-back family historians off the back of a system providing > contemporary legal and "professional" services, which has to be built to a > much higher level of robustness, security, etc, etc. The whole problem seems to be outdated legal requirements that prevent people and organisations from even considering moving forward into the 'sunlit uplands' allied to the natural inertia of government ! And then, of course, there's the money angle. John B Leic., Eng