Digital Domesday Defies Doom

Hulver writes "The BBC Domesday project, originally completed in 1986 and under threat (as reported in this old slashdot story) has had its data recovered. The contents of the laserdiscs have been put on DVD, and new programs written so that PCs can access the data. Interestingly, most of the images and films were not recovered from the laserdiscs, but were instead re-digitised from the original analog films at a higher resolution than the laserdiscs contained. Full details of the recovered data are at the Public Record Office website."

Comments

Re:Something else this reminds me of

[Raul654]

Sorry about the reply to my own post, but the article refers to Francis Bacon's shrieking pope paintings. Here's a link.

Re:[ed. note: no it isn't]

[usotsuki]

Read your history and learn about the Domesday [sic] Book. It's not a mistake.

YFI

-uso.

Your forget one thing though

[Raul654]

Language drifts and changes. Pick up a copy Beowulf, circle AD 800. Chances are you won't understand a whole lot, it's written in old english. What with the great vowel shift, the meanings of most of those words have significantly changed. Now, instead of 1200 years, imagine what 100,000 years of language evolution would do to such a warning. That's why ANY warning they choose will probably be pictoral, not script.

Re:But where is it...?

[JamesO]

I think (and this will go down really well here) that the problem is of licensing. The copyright clearance obtained for the original project didn't include republication rights, so they're not able to republish the content in a different form without contacting all the copyright holders. That would be
expensive and timeconsuming, even if they could find all the information...

Re:Quality

[gfody]

from your statement it seems you think that just because data is not digital, it will degrade.

it is actually the medium that degrades, data corruption is a side-effect. film is vulnerable to heat and light and laserdisc is vulnerable to scratching. the format of the data is irelevent.

you should also realize that just the act of digitizing data is degrading it. the digital version will always be a subset of the analog version. really the only upside to digital is the ability to make exact copies.

the only thing you can do is preserve the original in analog format the best you can, digitizing it once in a while whenever better digitizing technology is available.