Digitisation - what is it good for?

I'm sure everybody who works on digitisation projects has at some point worked with material so obscure that you wondered 'what's the bloody point?'

I certainly have. Not the big ticket stuff like Trove, but boring stuff like the correspondence of an obscure, and clearly personality challenged Victorian botanist whose private diary includes such gems as 

'Matilda came to tea today and we discussed saxifrages'

Yeah, exactly.

However, I have a personal story to show that all data is valuable.

Twenty years ago, when  I was (just) still living in England, I had an operation for varicose veins.

It's something that runs in my family, like my having slightly high blood pressure, my brother had them, my father had them, I had them.

And it wasn't due to lifestyle. My father swam, went walking, rode his bike well into his seventies and played golf as long as he was able to. My brother played cricket well into his forties. I went bushwalking and rode my bike, as well as running a decent distance three or four times a week.

As I say it's genetics, and unfortunately the cards you're dealt aren't always the best.

So, shortly before I moved permanently to Australia I had quite a radical procedure to strip out the damaged veins. Given the genetic component, it wasn't a guaranteed fix, and there was a 10-20% risk of recurrent varicosities associated with the procedure.

Well, for about fifteen years everything was fine, but one day when were at the beach J noticed a knotty purple patch behind my left knee. It wasn't painful, and if I rode my bike a bit more than usual it seemed to diminish, but it was clear that it wasn't going to go away.

So, I arranged to go and see a specialist. 

Didn't happen, the pandemic intervened and all treatment for non life threatening conditions was postponed.

Now I couldn't remember the precise details of the procedure, or the date. But I had read that you could ask the NHS in Britain for a copy of your case notes as a freedom of information thing.

So I emailed the hospital where I was treated and asked them if they still had my case notes as I wished to pass them to my specialist in Australia.

I fully expected that they would say no, they had long since been pulped, but to my great surprise, they said yes, they still had some of my records and even better, they had been digitised.

So after some to and fro over how I was to prove I was me - we settled on a scan of my passport and my UK national insurance number - they packaged up what they had for me to download as a password protected zip file.

They didn't have everything, but they had the details of the procedure, the results of the pre operation diagnostic tests, and the post operative assessment, which is probably all my Australian specialist will need when I see her next week.

So, key takeaway, digitisation and digital archiving is a good thing - it might just save you some pain and discomfort down the track...