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Domesday Book Goes Online

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-doomsday-that's-in-a-ghostbusters-episode dept.

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."

2 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Old tech vs new by Space+cowboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Interesting that the original domesday book is still useful for territorial disputes almost a thousand years after it was written, but that the domesday project, a modern equivalent on laserdisk is no longer readable roughly 20 years after introduction.

    Even though later on, an effort was made to port to the PC it reminds us just how ephemeral modern information is. If a year is a long time in politics, a decade is an eternity in computing tech.

    Open standards (and not closed or proprietary document formats) are the only weapon we have against a "digital dark ages" descending on us. There are already files I have from my early computing days (written to an Exabyte tape in a non-standard dump-format) that I can't read. My PhD thesis is out-of-bounds in digital form, unless I get a used DECstation from ebay...

    Just food for thought...

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!
  2. pay ??? by madhippy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    what annoys me is that whenever the British government/local government or other British institutions put this sort of information online here in the UK - they expect to be able to charge for it (our taxes paid for the running of these institutions etc) ...

    compare that to the way the US gov./institutions tends to free up information ... imagine paying to download nasa/hubble images !!

    (tho sometimes US orgs tend to go a bit too far - eg Americas Army)