Domesday Book Goes Online 100
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."
Pages come with a translation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pages come with a translation (Score:4, Funny)
Brilliant! Maybe they'll inspire the American IRS to do the same thing with the tax codes.
Re:Pages come with a translation (Score:1)
Dr. Strangelove (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Dr. Strangelove (Score:4, Informative)
From the wikipedia article:
cool (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like it, anyway.
Re:cool (Score:1)
Re:Cool! (Score:1, Offtopic)
Yeah, the Doomsday book was way cooler because Superman got killed. [wikipedia.org] And then there was like an evil robot Superman, some questionable cloning activity, and Shaquille O'Neil in a technologically-advanced suit of armor.
Re:Cool! (Score:1)
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cool! (Score:2)
Or yours, at any rate.
Re:Cool! (Score:1)
In seriousness, I actually found TFA interesting. Its not actually boring.
Note to self: The Internet cannot transmit innocent facetiousness.
great! (Score:4, Funny)
Finally I'll be able to settle my dispute with a neighbouring lord over these slaves [domesdaybook.net] I have. Peasants. I mean peasants, not slaves. Right.
SMMMMMMART!!!!! (Score:1)
So lets put it on the front page of slashdot. As if that will help it out....
Re:SMMMMMMART!!!!! (Score:1)
Re:SMMMMMMART!!!!! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:SMMMMMMART!!!!! (Score:2)
Re:Doomsday? (Score:1)
Having consulted Britain's most qualified expert [wikipedia.org] on doomsdays [wikipedia.org], he says this:
Doomsday = ((y/12)+y%12+(y%12)/4)%7+anchor
Of course, by that math, Tuesday is doomsday, and the point in time when we're all doomed. Kinda sucks to be us.
Re:Doomsday? (Score:1)
Re:HUH? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is an outrage! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is an outrage! (Score:1, Funny)
Re:This is an outrage! (Score:2)
Old tech vs new (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though later on, an effort was made to port to the PC [domesday1986.com] 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...
Re:Old tech vs new (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Old tech vs new (Score:1)
Is that a problem with the format, or has the laserdisc just melted into nothing?
Folks oft bring up the problem of 'disc rot' when Ask Slashdot cycles round to its 'what's a good backup solution' season, (although I've never personally observed it, my discs are all swank-tastic. JINX! I know!), but eventually this stuff is going to be destroyed somehow.
Remember that bit in The Time Machine where the books crumble to dust? Unless we inve
Re:Old tech vs new (Score:3, Informative)
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 ?
S
Re:Old tech vs new (Score:2)
extracting the text data is a doddle, but the video is fast degrading and the only copyable copys are not 1st generation.
Re:Old tech vs new (Score:2)
Re:Old tech vs new (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [domesday1986.com]
Re:Old tech vs new (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Old tech vs new (Score:2, Informative)
All your land records are belong to us (Score:1, Funny)
Of course it's more durable! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:ROFLMAO (Score:1)
Re:Of course it's more durable! (Score:2)
Domesday is likely to survive in digital form for a long time,
Re:Of course it's more durable! (Score:2)
The only problem with this strategy (and it is something that has been used for thousands of years in the past with great success), is that sometimes the gold itself as bullion is more valuable than the information it contains.
Long Long Long-Term Storage (Score:2)
Nickel or nickel alloys can be used, which are less intrinsically valuable (although any material, especially metal, has some intrinsic value).
Here are two [svensk.info] companies [norsam.com] that micro-etch information onto nickel or nickel all
Re:Long Long Long-Term Storage (Score:2)
I love the comment on the durible.info site that suggests a document lifetime of over a million years... surviving an ice age or two. That is document preservation!
Now to find something worth doing this sort of presevat
Re:Of course it's more durable! (Score:2)
Re:i think i drank too much (Score:1)
And except for the minor details of being underpowered and underarmed the Pup was perhaps the best all around plane of the war. The Camel scared (and killed) its own pilots, the Pup was unive
Doomsday? (Score:1)
Re:Doomsday? (Score:1)
Bloomsday Book (Score:2)
property (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:property (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:property (Score:2)
Fascinating, on two levels. (Score:1)
Secondly, Domesday is a word I've never encountered before, so that my brain filled in automatically with the second 'o' and erased the 'e', so as to spell Doomsday. It's a neat trick, and from what I'm reading in this thread, most of us fell for it. There you have it, the power of the brain in action.
Re:Fascinating, on two levels. (Score:2)
Actually, from what I know (admittedly not much, but I think Wikipedia is on my side here) that's not a bad interpretation. Domesday is some sort of Middle/Old English word that means pretty close to "Doomsday
Re:Fascinating, on two levels. (Score:1)
Parchment vs Online (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Parchment vs Online (Score:1)
Or the parchment could be destroyed in a fire tomorrow, while the digital version gets spre
Re:Parchment vs Online (Score:1)
Vellum is basically inert, and suffers damage only from external sources. Parchment will degrade naturally over time, even when kept in a managed environment.
Re:Parchment vs Online (Score:2)
I think you got it wrong. parchment [wikipedia.org] is tanned skin, vellum [wikipedia.org] can be made of cellulose (but is orginally parchment)
Re:Parchment vs Online (Score:1)
I spend three years studying the middle ages, get my degree, and then promptly forget what the sources I studied were actually recorded on. Sheesh.
Modern reprints (Score:1)
Personally, I think society owes it to the future to make such repositories, holding 10,000-year-archives of the worlds most important ancient documents and keeping them safe from the end of the human race.
While they are at it, throw in some modern-day Rosetta Stone equivalents.
Copyright on millenia-old documents (Score:1)
Solution to that... (Score:1)
Hard: Buy access to the highest-resolution-possible version of the photographs, then hire an expert reproduction-artist/legitimate-forger to "redraw" each page onto similar materials.
It's my understanding such facscimilie reproductions are already widely available and predate this project.
Remember, not everyone needs access to a high-resolution copy. Most of us are fine with either just the text or a cheap facscimilie.
Re:Copyright on millenia-old documents (Score:1)
I personally find it despicable that they want to charge people for access, and if they have any kind of DRM, I hope they all go to hell.
Re:Copyright on millenia-old documents (Score:1)
Having said that, I'm curious what the situation is in the UK. For example, I'm sure I remember seeing things like "Crown Copyright" on reproductions in museums, even when the original must surely have been out of copyright.
Re:Copyright on millenia-old documents (Score:2)
pay ??? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Mod parent up! deep disappointment! Not free! (Score:2)
Re:pay ??? (Score:2)
The records of parliament and my local councils are readable and searchable online for free, which is what bothers me more.
Re:pay ??? (Score:2)
Oh, c'mon. You think Syria and Iran are too far?
Re:pay ??? (Score:1)
Re:pay ??? (Score:2)
Re:pay ??? (Score:1)
Re:pay ??? (Score:1)
This is a consequence of the decision to devolve the management of certain parts of government and give them what is known as trading fund status. Effectively, these have different financial arrangements to other parts of government. To quote from here [ordnancesurvey.co.uk]:
What about the -NEW- Doomsdat Book? (Score:2)
a bit like the Foxfire Series of books (in that people went out
into their communities to gather the content - photos, songs -
on paper or tape - etc.?
Is the new version on-line?
If not now, when?
Re:What about the -NEW- Doomsdat Book? (Score:2)
Why so long? (Score:2)
Google Maps (Score:1)
Essential and timeless questions (Score:1)
1. What is the manorglossary icon called?
2. Who held it in the time of King Edward?
3. Who holds it now?
4. How many hides are there?
5. How many ploughglossary icons on the demesneglossary icon and among the men?
6. How many free men, sokemenglossary icon, villans, cottarsglossary icon, slavesglossary icon?
7. How much woodland, meadow, pasture, mills, fisheries?
8. How much has been added to or taken away from the manor?
9. How much was the whole worth
Re:Essential and timeless questions (Score:2)
She prefers wiccan, you insensitive clod. 12. What is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?
African or European?