Case Study : BBC Blue Peter Domesday Disc

A widely quoted case study illustrates the problem well. ‘The Domesday Book’, William the Conqueror’s survey of England in 1086, is still readable today in the UK National Archives at Kew, London. A modern, digital version of the ‘Domesday Book’ was created by the BBC children’s programme Blue Peter in 1986 to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original. Children were invited to submit digital material about their community, which was stored on the latest technology – 12-inch laser disks – to guard against obsolescence.

Just 15 years later, serious action had to be taken to save these records from being lost. Fortunately, the time-gap from creation was sufficiently small that a few laser disk readers still existed, so this problem could be solved. The files were extracted in binary format onto more modern media. The next challenge was to interpret this so that it was not just a meaningless string of 1s and 0s, as the digital files could not be interpreted by any modern software. Solving this problem was a not a trivial exercise, but was completed successfully after considerable effort including experience and input from the original record creators.

Although the records are now safe, for another 15 years maybe, the amount of effort required to preserve a relatively small amount of information shows that it is not practical to rely on such methods for all digital records – active preservation measures are preferable.

For more information on the restoration project see here