Public Record Office | About the PRO | Preserving the Archives | Digital Preservation The National Archives have recently unveiled a new version of the BBC Domesday Project in the archives library at Kew. Together with LongLife Data Ltd, ATSF and the BBC, the National Archives have rescued data from the famous Domesday discs and made it available through a new Windows PC interface.

The BBC Domesday Project was a national project carried out between 1984 and 1986 to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book. Its aim was to create a modern version of William the Conqueror's famous survey of the wealth and resources of his kingdom. All over the country, school children and other researchers collected huge amounts of information about the communities in which they lived. This information, in the form of text and photographs, was recorded onto two 12" videodiscs that could be played using a BBC Master computer connected to a special LV-ROM player.

A user of the system was able to zoom in on a map of the British Isles and gain detailed information about any part of the country. The BBC Domesday Project was incredibly innovative for the time and was organised on a scale that has not been seen before or since.

In 1986 the end-result of this EC co-funded £2.5 million project - a full BBC Domesday system - was presented to the then Keeper of the Public Records. In 2003, this system is one of the few working examples of the BBC Domesday Project. After 16 years of use, most of the LV-ROM players produced have reached the end of their working lives. As a storage technology, LV-ROM has been superseded by CD-ROM and DVD, leaving the BBC Domesday discs perilously close to becoming unreadable.