Parliament's digitalisation project failed and irreplaceable documents have likely been destroyed by the fire

mylesillidge

mylesillidge

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I don't how understand how you can fark up something so simple.

For a few million I could have bought a few good scanners and paid a few students per legible page, with a couple of supervisors to check.
 
"Over the course of two years, an outside company was paid millions of rands to scan Parliament’s collection of about 7,000 volumes of material or seven million individual pages."

That is the start of the tender issue.

If you go by discounted volume, it should never even come close to R1 per page at this volume so how could it have cost millions to scan seven million individual pages. I would love to know the actual cost of this project, maybe I am reading into things but I highly doubt it was less than R7million and probably closer to R20million+ knowing how this government completely overspend on all their tenders.
 
mylesillidge said:
Parliament blew R5 million on unreadable scans of priceless documents — now likely destroyed in fire

A botched digitisation project has probably condemned irreplaceable documents to extinction following the fire in Parliament.

Over the course of two years, an outside company was paid millions of rands to scan Parliament’s collection of about 7,000 volumes of material or seven million individual pages.
Click to expand...
I can just guess how this went...

7 million pages takes a LOT of space...a FUK lot.

So iKno goes to parliament and makes proposals for a solution for this space problem.

As usual, parliament does not respond.

Now iKno has to go ahead to stay on schedule and show results for that huge retainer.

Eventually iKno decides: "Fuk this..were not spending our own money on HDD's anymore, so they start compressing the schit out of the scans.

Result: illegible scans.

More requests for storage solution are ignored by Parliament and re-scans are not validated.

iKno decides fuk this and walks away....

OR something to this effect. T's & C's Apply.
 
SAguy said:
I don't how understand how you can fark up something so simple.

For a few million I could have bought a few good scanners and paid a few students per legible page, with a couple of supervisors to check.
Click to expand...
Exactly...


That's completely NOT how that works...you're not scanning a textbook at Varsity.
 
Not mad with them. Not even surprised. I always knew that the ANC, all their followers and cadres combined, was never capable of digitizing a single document, let alone a whole library.
 
MightyQuin said:
I can just guess how this went...

7 million pages takes a LOT of space...a FUK lot.

So iKno goes to parliament and makes proposals for a solution for this space problem.

As usual, parliament does not respond.

Now iKno has to go ahead to stay on schedule and show results for that huge retainer.

Eventually iKno decides: "Fuk this..were not spending our own money on HDD's anymore, so they start compressing the schit out of the scans.

Result: illegible scans.

More requests for storage solution are ignored by Parliament and re-scans are not validated.

iKno decides fuk this and walks away....

OR something to this effect. T's & C's Apply.
Click to expand...

Sounds highly improbable.

They could have infinite low cost storage by making use of cloud storage if that is their concern.

These tenders usually have a big enough excess cost for any additional expenditure aside from what they get ahead of starting the job (which would be enough to within reason finish the job if they have any capable project manager handling the estimations of the work).

This shtty work is simply due to someone who knew whoever were in charge to verify its all in order would do a lousy or non job and that the company doing the scans could just rush through it using their single R50 Genius scanner at 50dpi.
 
MightyQuin said:
Exactly...


That's completely NOT how that works...you're not scanning a textbook at Varsity.
Click to expand...
How so?

Looking at the quality of scans they would have been better off letting varsity students scan it in.
 
MightyQuin said:
I can just guess how this went...

7 million pages takes a LOT of space...a FUK lot.

So iKno goes to parliament and makes proposals for a solution for this space problem.

As usual, parliament does not respond.

Now iKno has to go ahead to stay on schedule and show results for that huge retainer.

Eventually iKno decides: "Fuk this..were not spending our own money on HDD's anymore, so they start compressing the schit out of the scans.

Result: illegible scans.

More requests for storage solution are ignored by Parliament and re-scans are not validated.

iKno decides fuk this and walks away....

OR something to this effect. T's & C's Apply.
Click to expand...
I dunno hey.

How large is a single page black and white pdf, about 500kb?

0.5mb x 7 000 000 = 3 500 000mb
That's 3.5tb.

Absolutely nothing.
Even at 1mb a page that's 7tb.

Heck even 10mb a page is 70tb, still nothing.

70tb stored in AWS S3 is gonna cost you less than $2000 a month.
 
mylesillidge said:
A botched digitisation project has probably condemned irreplaceable documents to extinction following the fire in Parliament
Click to expand...

Good. The less we know about our history, the less butthurt we will be
 
SAguy said:
I dunno hey.

How large is a single page black and white pdf, about 500kb?

0.5mb x 7 000 000 = 3 500 000mb
That's 3.5tb.

Absolutely nothing.
Even at 1mb a page that's 7tb.

Heck even 10mb a page is 70tb, still nothing.

70tb stored in AWS S3 is gonna cost you less than $2000 a month.
Click to expand...
An illegible page will be 500KB yes...

Again:

You do realize that you do not just scan 7 000 000 pages and walk away. It has to be Indexed using specific software...otherwise what would be the point?

What format does the Archiving Software require scans to be in?
At what compression?

As usual we know just enough to be able to speculate...
 
John Tempus said:
Sounds highly improbable.

They could have infinite low cost storage by making use of cloud storage if that is their concern.

These tenders usually have a big enough excess cost for any additional expenditure aside from what they get ahead of starting the job (which would be enough to within reason finish the job if they have any capable project manager handling the estimations of the work).

This shtty work is simply due to someone who knew whoever were in charge to verify its all in order would do a lousy or non job and that the company doing the scans could just rush through it using their single R50 Genius scanner at 50dpi.
Click to expand...
I do not think that cloud storage was the only factor. We have no idea what the requirements were for scan evaluation, security of access to the scans...so so many things.

Archiving is a huge technical process...not just putting a book in a flatbed scanner and pressing scan.

Anyway.....
 
In summary, the cANCer putty's negligence has destroyed all parliamentary records of Apartheid and probably Jan van Riebeeck as well.

Maybe Jan will finally be off the hook for loadshitting and all the other bizarre things the cANCer putty posthumously blames on him.

Jacobus van Zuma, that's who is to blame.
 
Next time I will file invoices and slips that are "satisfactory" to Sars for my taxes. Best part, mine are actual originals that hand sanitizer has somehow blotched, not crappy company scanned...
 
Thank god the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City in the US digitized all documents in the various National Archives across South Africa and is now making it available online. Imagine the tragedy if the National Archives in any province should lose all those estate files, divorce records, marriage records, voter rolls, immigration records, civil death registration, baptism records, birth registers and much, much more - all from the 1600's to the mid 2000's.
 
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