Data from BBC Domesday Project

PRO 30/100

1984-1986

The BBC Domesday Project was a pair of interactive video discs made by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book. The video discs feature about a million people in the UK. They contain video clips from the BBC and Independent Television (ITV) as well as 200,000 pictures and tens of thousands of maps. One of the major interactive projects of its time, it was undertaken on a scale not seen since and was published by BBC Enterprises in November 1986. The package was made up of two discs: the Community Disc and the National Disc. The Community disc is map-based and shows Britain as seen by the people who live there while the National disc is topic based and provides an overview of Britain. The accessioned material is the analogue image data from both the community and national discs converted into DigiBeta broadcast format and the original 12 inch video discs.

NOTE: In May 2011 the BBC 1986 Domesday project was made available online by the BBC: Domesday Reloaded.

Also, a snapshot of the website was taken on 16 January 2012 for permanent preservation in the UK Government Web Archive.

Not Public Record(s)

English

datasets, electronic documents and files

Cannot be copied without copyright owner's permission. (Please Note: These electronic documents are not currently in a presentable or readable format and are unavailable for public viewing).

Open unless otherwise stated

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC Worldwide)

Topics

Art, architecture and design

Taxation

Radio and television

Maps and plans

Landed estates

The BBC Domesday Project was a national project carried out between 1984 and 1986 to celebrate the 900th Anniversary of the Domesday book. Its aim was to create a modern version of William the Conqueror's famous survey of the wealth and resources of his kingdom. Throughout the UK, school children and other researchers collected huge amounts of information about the communities in which they lived. This information, in the form of text and photographs, was recorded onto two 12 inch videodiscs that could be viewed using a BBC master computer connected to a special videodisc LV-ROM player.

After 16 years of use most LV-ROM players had reached the end of their working lives and as a storage technology LV-ROM had been superceded by CD-ROM and DVD, leaving the Domesday discs in danger of becoming unreadable. Working with The National Archives, BBC, and ATSF, LongLife Data produced a new pilot version of the BBC Domesday Community disc which was published online at the time but is no longer available.