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

[cpt kangarooski]

I'm kind of inclined to think that it's not possible. Instead we might be better off just concealing the site.

I say this because I can't help but think of how many tombs have been robbed regardless of warnings to keep out. In fact, we usually think of it as stupid superstition and proceed headlong.

That would be bad at Yucca of course, because for once the curse -- that people will get sick and die due to invisible forces -- is true.

storage space

[Graspee_Leemoor]

"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. "

This is why I have all my CDs stored as .flac, so I can be laughing in the distant future when everyone has crappy mp3s just because they wanted to save some space decades ago when 700 meg was a lot.

graspee

Land mines. Small ones.

[vkg]

Seriously. I really think that a couple of hundred thousand mechanically activated (or perhaps solar so they come awake when they're dug up?) landmines are the answer.

Yes, there'll be a few casualties, but by god what ever our pig ignorant descendents make of the situation, they'll be wary investigators. Death is a pretty fucking good keep out sign, and probably a lot less loss of life will result than if they carve their way inside and start wearing uranium as jewelery from the ancient gods...

Quality

[hackwrench]

...re-digitised from the original analog films at a higher resolution than the laserdiscs contained.

That's great as long as the film hasn't degraded to worse than the quality of the laserdisc images and the resolution is there to begin with.

The wonder of modern methods.

[Anonymous Coward]

Domesday Book, vellum and ink, still readable after 900 years.

Domesday Book II, Laser disks and computer files, in need of rescue after 17 years.

Progress ?

Re:The wonder of modern methods.

[adri]

Doomsday 1 - text and possibly sketches.

Doomsday 2 - text, sound, moving pictures, photographs, cross-linked statistics and from how its been described a very intense lookup system.

Yup. Progress. Things have changed significantly in 17 years. I just hope people learn from these kinds of media mistakes.

Re:Your forget one thing though

[IvyMike]

I wonder if widespread printing, audio, and video recording technology might have a long-term stabilizing effect on language.

M$ format = they'll have to do the same again

[cabalamat2]

The guarenteed way of protecting data against time is to make lots and lots of copies. The internet is the perfect medium for that. So yes, why don't they put it on the internet?

Becasue they are stupid, probably.

The ironic thing is that because they have decided to convert it to a proprietary Microsoft format, they will probably have to repeat the exercise in another 15 years. Bloody idiots.

Re:M$ format = they'll have to do the same again

[gilesjuk]

Which all goes to show that open source allows data and software to be rescued at lot easier. If a copy protection company goes bust and data on a disc can't be decrypted due to DMCA style laws then you're stuffed?

Re:Why would you need to store as .flac...

[Read Icculus]

Backup. It's just like having the original .wav files, so if anything happens to the CD you have a perfect backup copy. You get all the benefits of it being digitized as well, you can play it in it's full audio glory on your computer/stereo, you can FTP or transfer the tracks in a format that is a clone of what is on the disc, but with a nice time-saving amount of compression. Also when the CD format dies out you have the digital file sitting around on your HD, which will no doubt be the way we store our media in the future. Your question is similar, (albeit with a few important differences), to asking "Why keep around the full rip of your DVDs? You already have the DVD. Why not just make a divx and leave it at that?" Quality is important, disk space is cheap, and there's nothing like a perfect backup when you are serious about archiving.

Static media is really no use

[Moderation abuser]

It's clear that any specific format will last for a while and then be obsoleted within a decade or so.

Therefore transferring the information from format to format automatically as new and cheaper solutions arrive. This means a process and to simplify and reduce costs, some automatic tools to do the job.

There are hierarchical storage management[1] solutions around which can do this for you, Tivoli do quite a good one, but, because we're talking long term, the software really also needs to be cross platform and open source.

[1] http://itmanagement.webopedia.com/TERM/H/HSM.html

Re:Static media is really no use

[Anonymous Coward]

People are approaching this whole problem from the wrong angle. There's no way you'll be able to preserve media if you assume that formats are going to be constantly changing.

The fact of the matter is, assuming they don't rot, a CD is going to be just as readable 1000 years from now as a book. The problem is that the information you need to read it might not be preserved (but then again, the same applies to a book--the same sort of problem applies to forms of ancient writing that haven't been preserved, you can figure stuff out but it's not really easy).

If you're really serious about archival, you need to preserve both the information you want to save, as well as the information you need to get the information (just preserving the devices isn't going to help in the long run). This is something of an infinite recursion, so you have to stop at some point, but it's still more useful than just preserving media and hoping you can upgrade it later (when we all may be dead due to nuclear war or something).

The ideal format would be self-reading. Something like a crystal that you can leave in the sunlight at just the right angle, and projects information for you. Sorta a modern update of Stonehenge or something. This is like preserving the devices, but with the additional properties that you can replicate it easily (like most media), and that it's durable (can't get much more durable than a crystal with no moving parts).

Re:If this system were off on a planet somewhere

[Peyna]

More importantly, would it matter if it works?

Re:Your forget one thing though

[WowTIP]

I'm not sure pictorial warnings would be any better. The guys in 102003 A.D. will probably think the gruesome images are irrational warnings of holy ground by the superstitious lowtech people of the 21 century. It's not like 20:th century people heeded warnings in pyramids and such before desacrating them.

Re:please tell me

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, what do you think "YFI" stands for?

i have no idea, please enlighten me...

15 years, try 15 minutes!

[grundie]

I was at school when the Domesday project was being built, in fact my school was one the schools responsible for covering part of Carlisle in Cumbria.

Our school bough one of the Domesday kits and on the first day all the teachers were bringing us through in to the library class by class to show it off. This was until one of the teachers dropped one of the discs and it shattered, bearing that in mind I am very surprised there are still discs in woking order after all this time.

I would hope now that they will work on some of the other discs that used the Domesday hardware. I vividly remember a disc that featured an interacitve film. Basically the topic was about wathching a group of kids mucking around and every 2-3 minutes it would freeze and various options would appear over the characters, e.g "Simon calls Peter stupid". Depending on what you chose (using the track ball) the film would take a different path, either they would all go home happy or they would end up in some sort of trouble. Never mind the brainwashing apsects of the film (i.e. don't misbehave kids), the technology was trail blazing. This was in 1987! Years before DVD and even now I've seen very few interactive DVD films.

Aparently there was over an hour of film and 4 possible endings to a 15 minute program on one of those discs. Whats more the system was very quick and totally foolproof.

As an 11 year old obsessed with technology I was in awe of all this fancy equipment, Domesday wasn't just a great archiving project it also introduced some fancy technology which even today seems new fangled.

What the BBC and their partners should have done is to add new material to the Domesday archive every 5 or so years. As well as the obvious enrichment of the archive, this would also mean there was a chance to update the technology in steps in order to keep track with data storage devlopements. Instead once it was finished it was forgotten about, meaning 15 years later when people realise the value of the project you have to get university's on board to make sense of the storage medium, data and software. That would have been a much better way to preserve the data.