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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.
Wow, I actually read two pages on the site before realizing it was DOMESday.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I have property deeds from the 16th century in what is now oxfordshire, that I found years ago in a jumble sale of all places. I can track them back even further now.
Sounds like it, anyway.
Amongst other interesting facts, the BBC is reporting that the Book can still be used today in court for property disputes.
Finally I'll be able to settle my dispute with a neighbouring lord over these slaves I have. Peasants. I mean peasants, not slaves. Right.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Putting public records online... Think of the privacy issues! Phishers and identity thieves will have a heyday!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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!
it remains to be seen whether the Domesday Book online will be more or less fragile than the parchment originals."
That's a joke, but it demonstrates a principle of digital information that people have not gotten used to yet.
The first time someone gets a copy of the original, the document will have doubled it's durability. If they really liberate it, they will immortalize it and greatly reduce the cost of distributing it. "Protecting" something you want to publish reduces it's chance of survival. This is not special to electronic publishing.
What's different is the cheapness of sharing and that removes the need to protect publications. Once upon a time, people chained books to their shelves because that book took a substantial fraction of someones' life to make or copy and there were very few coppies. Today, the contents can be duplicated without special material in the blink of an eye, unless there's some nasty DRM stuck on it. DRM makes it difficult for the honest user to read and impossible to copy. Chains are no longer required and making digital information more difficult to work with than what it replaces is perverse.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I wonder who would gain from a property dispute? the Black Plague in the 14th century devestated the English population and as a result a lot of peasants became landowners themselves. They were able to negotiate these land deals because basically there weren't many laborers left to work the land and the lords were desperate, so they gave the peasants land in exchange for labor. In fact things were really rearranged quite a bit at that time (14th C) regarding property. I am unsure how anyone could prove a valid claim -they would have to do some serious researching into the following centuries proving the land wasn't legitimately sold or transferred.
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More fragile. The parchment, if properly stored in a cool, dark, dry place (which is easy to do and requires very little technology - almost none, actually) will last another 1000 years. I seriously doubt ANYTHING online will be around in 1000 years. I doubt we will have electricity in 1000 years.
RS
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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) ...
... imagine paying to download nasa/hubble images !!
compare that to the way the US gov./institutions tends to free up information
(tho sometimes US orgs tend to go a bit too far - eg Americas Army)
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