it's not as easy as just scanning them to PDF and putting them on the website
What a load of bollocks.
What you will find is that the department that is to do with those publications is proberly staffed by 45-65 year old employees. Who have a black belt in job creation. They will be not very hot at using a computer and I suspect will require a training budget greater than the cost of the salary of one person who knows what they are doing.
And there is not alot you can do about them without the unions getting upset. Even if you design systems around them you can get into trouble. Unions get upset if you seem to be making them redundant.
Thinking about it the mangers proberly have a bit of a nightmare what to do with these types in a civil service enviroment, when you don't have the option of getting rid of them.
MJ