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Domesday Book Goes Online
Accommodate Students writes "The Domesday Book has gone online. As one of the earliest public records goes online, anyone with an internet connection will be able to access this important document. Amongst other interesting facts, the BBC is reporting that the Book can still be used today in court for property disputes. In an interesting development, the National Archives are making online searches free, but downloads of data will cost £3.50 (approx $6.50 US). Similar launches of historical websites in the past have struggled to keep up with server loads in their first days and weeks, so it remains to be seen whether the Domesday Book online will be more or less fragile than the parchment originals."
I've used this service a few times already. Each image of the original page is supplied with a translation so one can make sense of it.
From the wikipedia article:
It's actually a proprietary format on the laserdisk as well - I don't know if laserdisks (weren't they analogue ?) ever had a standard format like CDROM's do. I think it was more along the lines of "format it for this machine, and only this machine can read it".
Now that the machine is vanished into the history books, the data is unreadable (or was, until they ported it to the PC, but I believe that took a *lot* of effort, and who's to say that in 20 years, the PC will still be around in it's current form ?
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Please mod this guy up, he's got one helluva point.
At least a quarter of the population was directly killed by the Plague within a six year span. As noted, this was bound to jumble and reassemble the social structure in a major way, a process that probably lasted for decades.
However, a bit of speculation: Many land-owning families must have been wiped clean off the face of the Earth, many others would probably have migrated elsewhere, London perhaps, in an attempt to find better fortunes. It's entirely possible that the canniest survivors took advantage of the chaos, changing their names overnight, becoming 'cousins' to the less fortunate families, claiming title to their lands. In this manner, the names would remain the same, albeit under false pretenses. So maybe the property structure was kept more intact than we might suppose at face value.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
The 1980s Domesday Project is available online - it's still perfectly readable.
The biggest problem with getting the Domesday Project online was *not* reading the data - it was COPYRIGHTS (and finding all the copyright holders down to get permission).
You can use the 1986 Domesday project here: http://www.domesday1986.com/
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Interestingly I can't get at it.... Maybe I'm missing a plugin or maybe the site is experiencing problems, but I only get a blank window. If anything that illustrates the problems of digital versions nicely. Though it may be possible for me to get at it with another browser etc. - access to it certainly is more brittle and will require ongoing maintenance.
No, it just proves that the BBC who didn't keep any records of Copyright were unable to archive the material properly, and now you have only a couple of portals in which to view the original data (coming from the original disks via an emulator / translator of some kind no doubt). Paper/parchment needs archiving too, it is just that the digital equivalent is somewhat more difficult and there are no surviving copyrights. I suspect that the digital version will be widely distributed in future years when copyright expires.
The digital version was somewhat different to the original anyway - it had photographs, drawings, audio, and (most importantly) video. We could archive that on paper (if we knew the Copyright holders), but I think the cost of a suitable facility to preserve it might be prohibitive.
Personally, I think the British Government should step in and waive all Copyright holders rights to the digital version. After all, people knew what they were getting into with the project and its implications.