Digital Preservation and BBC Domesday

The CAMiLEON Project [1] was initiated in 1999 at the Universities of Leeds (JISC funded) and Michigan (NSF funded) to explore, develop and evaluate technical strategies [2] for use in digital preservation. In particular, CAMiLEON was tasked with getting to grips with a proposed strategy called Emulation. An emulator is a software program that mimics the function of another computer. In a digital preservation context it allows the execution of software programs and data from older computers on a current computer, acting as an alternative to data migration [3]. CAMiLEON developed a range of technical strategies and tested them with practical implementations. This paper examines the work of the University of Leeds in rescuing and emulating an early multimedia resource named BBC Domesday, and its implications for preserving our current digital heritage for the future. What is BBC Domesday? In 1983 with the 900th anniversary of the Norman Domesday Book fast approaching, a BBC Television producer named Peter Armstrong came up with an idea for a new digital Domesday that would record detail about life in the United Kingdom in the late 20th century. Rather than resulting in a printed record, BBC Domesday would utilise an exciting new technology called multimedia. The project resulted in a groundbreaking digital resource that captured the essence of everyday life in the UK in the mid eighties1. Hundreds of thousands of school children from across the country, a team of 60 researchers at the BBC and countless other scholars, statisticians and photographers contributed to this mammoth resource. A specially developed software interface allowed the user to search and browse the recorded information that was stored on 2 Videodiscs – the forerunner of today’s CDs and DVDs. An adapted BBC Microcomputer2, common in schools and homes at the time, was used to view the resource. Unfortunately, the price of a complete Domesday system was pushed up by 400% as the project went to the market in 1986. At around 4000 pounds sterling a time, the system did not sell well and quickly became a commercial flop and an embarrassment for the 1 Note that BBC Domesday was a completely new resource about the UK in the 1980s and not a digitisation of the Norman Domesday book. 2 The BBC Micro had a similar ubiquity in the UK to that of the Apple II in the USA in the mid eighties.