As the subject of TNA's approach to the release of service records has caused quite a bit of discussion - most of it not entirely complimentary - I think that listening to this explanation of the cataloguing process may be helpful in providing some background:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpCgYrp19BcOne of the cataloguing team at TNA explains the processes they have had to go through in order to get the documents properly referenced and to extract details of what each file contains, so that this skeleton information can be viewed via the TNA search tool Discovery.
The series she talks about are:
WO 420 - REME Other Ranks 56,000 files
WO 421 - Some of the smaller Corps 100,000 files
WO 427 - Females nurses (presumably QARANCs) based in East Africa - just 471 files.
and they only cover the period of the Second World War, although exactly what time period that means is not clear.
No explanation is given for what has happened with the files covering the period between the First and Second World Wars. As the archivist explains these three series represent just the first batch of the huge number of files being transferred from the MOD, and all the others will need to go through the same cataloguing process. TNA says that they discovered quite a lot of errors in the summary sheets which accompanied most of the files (the WO 427 series were completely unindexed).
The presentation doesn't say so, but I think it is clear that none of these files have been digitized. The options for accessing the whole service record for an individual seem to be
a. a personal visit to TNA,
b. paying a researcher to do so, or
c. paying the TNA staff to make a copy of the pages, provided that the data protection rules allow this.
I intend to test the process when I next visit TNA, to see what access is allowed. For instance, whether I have to prove a person is dead before I can see their records or will the fact they were born more than 100 years ago suffice.
