Rescuing the data

Working together with the BBC, LongLife Data Ltd and ATSF, The National Archives have installed a new version of the BBC Domesday software for visitors to use in the public reading rooms at Kew.

Visitors to The National Archives can obtain a reader's ticket (ID will be required - passport, drivers licence or credit card) and can then view this unique multimedia snapshot of life in 1986 Britain.

This new PC version of the Domesday software, provisionally known as "1986 Domesday Community", makes available the content of the BBC Domesday Community disc and provides a new user-friendly interface for searching and browsing.

It is the product of a collaboration that began in 2001 when Sally Pearce, a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton, asked her husband Adrian (a systems engineer and the director of LongLife Data Ltd) about the possibility of making the university's BBC Domesday discs available for current students to use on PCs. Sally had been involved with the 1986 project, having applied along with about 14 000 other people around the country for a block of 12 square kilometres to survey. The Domesday system and discs had fallen out of regular use at the university but had been carefully stored away in a cupboard.

Adrian's first goal was to get the BBC Master computer working reliably again. This was no simple task. It involved getting hold of and reading through systems documentation, trying to understand both the operating system commands and the internal workings of this mid-1980s computer. Having found and inserted necessary replacement components, made cables for connecting the computer to the LV-ROM player, and learned the necessary system commands, he was part way there.

Adrian had become an admirer of the original data structures that had been used by the BBC Domesday programmers to package up the images and text, relate them to the maps of the UK, and make them easily searchable for users. He made the decision therefore to preserve these data structures when migrating the data to the new system, instead of using a relational database to store the data.

Through attending the CAMiLEON emulator event in Leeds in 2002, Adrian met Jeffrey Darlington from The National Archives and Andy Finney of ATSF - one of the original BBC Domesday team. Andy and Jeffrey had already been working on digitising the original analogue film tapes held by the BBC. These tapes contained all of the pictures and the video clips that appear on the 2 discs, and at a higher quality than can be viewed using the Domesday system. Together, Andy, Adrian and Jeffrey decided that these high quality images, once digitized would be perfect for Adrian's new application. Once the BBC's 1-inch films had been digitized, the images were compressed (using standard JPEG compression) for inclusion in the new Domesday system.

Visitors to Kew can use the system to view data from both sides of the Domesday Community disc - for both the northern and southern halves of the country. Several BBC Domesday screens have been collated together into one simple user interface that displays a selected map together with its associated text, photographs, captions and grid references.

A search screen also allows users to search for a particular place name, grid reference or topic of interest about the daily lives of people living in the UK. The results can be filtered to show text and/or images relating to the current map being viewed.