Domesday project that technology forgot is unlocked

When the BBC decided to make a modern-day Domesday Book to mark the 900th anniversary of the original, it seemed like a good idea.

The project, which included more than a million people and is thought to have cost over £3m, was recorded in the Eighties on two virtually indestructible interactive video discs that could be accessed using a special computer system.

But the video discs outlived the computer system, which became obsolete.

To the embarrassment of the corporation, the massive project has been inaccessible for 16 years.

Yesterday, the announcement was made that scientific researchers had found a way to access the huge digital archive of life in the 1980s.

Researchers working on the Camileon project – based at Leeds University and the University of Michigan, in the United States – have developed software that emulates the obsolete BBC computer and video-disc player.

The project included photographers, journalists, academics and researchers, Ordnance Survey map-makers and statisticians at the census office. It also contained video clips from the BBC and ITV, and footage of schoolchildren at 10,000 schools and other members of the public.

David Greenwell, 24, a student, recalled devoting hours to the BBC Domesday project when he was an infant school pupil in the 1980s. Mr Greenwell said he always wondered what happened to the work he put in with fellow pupils at the Woodfield County Infants School, in Shrewsbury. "When I was in Year Three we did lots of work towards the project – social history about the time and things like that," he said yesterday. "We put it all on the database. It was quite a big thing at the time but we never got to see what happened to everything we did."

The Camileon project spent three years developing strategies for digital preservation and testing them with materials such as the BBC Domesday discs. Paul Wheatley, the project manager, said: "BBC Domesday has become a classic example of the dangers facing our digital heritage.

"Our work has demonstrated that techniques like emulation can provide successful routes to preservation, even with incredibly complex resources like BBC Domesday.

"But it must be remembered that time is of the essence. We must invest wisely in developing an infrastructure to preserve our digital records before it is too late.

"We must not make the mistake of thinking recording on a long-lived medium gives us meaningful preservation."

Mr Wheatley said all the software and hardware needed to run the BBC Domesday project would be deposited at the Public Record Office in Kew, south-west London. He said the information on the discs included 200,000 pictures and tens of thousands of maps.

The BBC has not decided yet how it will use the informationit has collated.