William the Conqueror undertook a remarkably trendy mission. In 1086, he started compiling and storing an in depth report of his realm: the place everybody lived, what they did and the place they got here from.
900 years later, the BBC started its personal Domesday mission, sending faculty youngsters out to conduct a neighborhood survey and gather details about Britain. This was a folks’s database, 20 years earlier than Wikipedia. However only a few years later, that interactive digital database was completely unreadable, the knowledge misplaced.
We are inclined to take archives without any consideration — however preservation doesn’t occur by chance, and digitisation doesn’t imply that one thing will final perpetually. And the erasure of the historic report has disastrous penalties for humanity.
Additional Studying
On William the Conqueror
English Heritage; Historical past of Data; the Nationwide Archives; Andrew Whitby, The Sum of the Individuals.
On the BBC Domesday Mission
Peter Armstrong remarks on the Centre for Pc Historical past 16 Nov 2019
Tony Quinn “Domesday Plus 900” Acorn Consumer December 1984
Jeffrey Darlington, Andy Finney and Adrian Pearce “Domesday Redux: The rescue of the BBC Domesday Mission videodiscs” Ariadne Subject 36, 30-July-2003
Andy Finney’s web site
Robin McKie and Vanessa Thorpe “Digital Domesday Ebook lasts 15 years not 1000” The Observer 3 March 2002
Mick Harker “Group stalwart dies” Sussex World 12 Feb 2008
The Centre for Computing Historical past.
Daniel Earwicker Domesday Reloaded Reloaded
On the Windrush Scandal
Demetrios Matheou “Surviving the Windrush Scandal” Unison Journal 6 June 2018
Amelia Gentleman “Man dwelling in UK for 56 years loses job over immigration papers” The Guardian 9 April 2018
Amelia Gentleman “House Workplace destroyed Windrush Touchdown playing cards, says ex-staffer” The Guardian 17 April 2018
Georgina Lee “FactCheck – who destroyed the Windrush Touchdown playing cards?” 24 April 2018
Amelia Gentleman The Windrush Betrayal 2019
Michael Braithwaite interview with ITV (embedded on the Each day Mail web site).
Human Rights Watch – “UK Hostile Compensation Scheme Fails Windrush Victims” 17 April 2023
On archives
Zittrain, J., Albert, Okay., & Lessig, L. (2014). “Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Downside of Hyperlink and Reference Rot in Authorized Citations.” Authorized Data Administration, 14(2), 88-99.
Richard Ovenden “We should combat to protect digital data” The Economist
Richard Ovenden Burning The Books
