back to article Hansard to pulp paper processes

Parliament's official recorder is planning to leave the paper age by processing ministers' written answers electronically. In April Hansard will launch a Parliamentary Questions Project to process responses to written questions electronically, a spokesperson said. The project is part of the three-year parliamentary Procedural …

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  1. robdyke
    FAIL

    'the system is complicated...'

    "The spokesperson said the system is complicated, as each parliamentary question has a unique identity number and the answer has to be linked to this."

    wot... like in one of them blog thingumies?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Wow, complex

    > The spokesperson said the system is complicated, as each parliamentary question has a unique identity number and the answer has to be linked to this.

    Sounds like they may need one of those new fangled "databases".

  3. Richard Porter
    Big Brother

    Unique key

    "the system is complicated, as each parliamentary question has a unique identity number and the answer has to be linked to this."

    Gosh! Ground-breaking stuff then!

  4. Alistair Wall
    FAIL

    Complicated?

    "The spokesperson said the system is complicated, as each parliamentary question has a unique identity number and the answer has to be linked to this."

    Foreign keys are complicated?

  5. Tom 7

    Now will it be computer shaped or paper shaped?

    By which I mean will it be in a format suitable for a computer screen or mindlessly formatted into a page size that means it has to be printed to read it comfortably?

    ie NOT PDF/DOC/ODF please!

  6. Just Thinking

    History

    I do sometimes wonder if, in 100 years time, we will be a great big hole in the historical records. There will still be photographs of the first world war, but what about us? Nobody will know how to read the few SD cards and USB sticks which survive, and they wouldn't understand the data formats even if they did. Any physical "photos" printed with cheap ink on bleached paper will long since have faded to nothing.

    The internet, in whatever form it might exists, will have churned a few times. Your blog won't still be there. Even facebook might have forgotten us all.

    So much for the little trivial insights into daily life like diaries or till receipts, even bigger stuff like Hansard is becoming digital. Unless it is continously being copied and converted to modern formats, in a historical timeframe it it will all disappear. Is anyone doing that?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      No ...

      No one will know _anything_ about us in a hundred (or fewer) years. What's worse, is that they won't even care to.

      Almost everything will have vanished along with the volatile storage and obsolete file formats (marked-up text will always be good -- but I'd store it on punched paper tape with a simple handwriten note on how to read it).

  7. Evan Essence
    Stop

    Archives

    If there's no paper involved, I hope they're building a damn good electronic archive for posterity. In the current economic climate, what are the chances of that?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      That's NOT what they want ...

      "In the current economic climate, what are the chances of that?"

      Nil.

      And that's what they are banking on.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    I've just had an icy shudder ...

    I've just read "The Book" by M. Clifford.

    This is all now just one big step closer.

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