Domesday

Back in 1986, the BBC set out to make a modern version of the Domesday Book. They got the public to submit articles and photos and they used, for the time, the cutting edge BBC Master computers and analogue laser discs to allow people to store and access the information.

However, unlike the original Domesday Book, which was hand written on paper and is therefore still readable, the then cutting edge technology has become very quickly obsolete. So much so that in just the 25 years after the project was launched, there was a distinct possibility that the data would become unreadable!

To stop this happening, the BBC has managed to extract the data and turn it into the Domesday Reloaded website. By turning it into a website, there is the hope that the information will be available for many years to come and by as many people who want to view it.

I thought I’d take a look at the site and search for Scouts in my area. I was a bit disappointed that the only things I could find (so far) was an article about my local camp site, Kibblestone, and an article about a now closed Group, 1st Wetley Rocks.

Still, there are over 1700 articles that mention Scouting, so this will be worth having a good look through. It will be interesting to see if those Groups who are mentioned on the site, and are still going, update their entries (see here and here as an example).