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."

Old tech vs new

[Space cowboy]

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 [atsf.co.uk], 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 [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...

Of course it's more durable!

[twitter]

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.

Parchment vs Online

[Ralph Spoilsport]

so it remains to be seen whether the Domesday Book online will be more or less fragile than the parchment originals."

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

pay ???

[madhippy]

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)

Re:HUH?

[nickco3]

Welcome to the 21st century, where Russia's economy is smaller than Belgium's.