Researchers based at Leeds University and the University of Michigan in the United States have solved the puzzle of how to access the BBC's Domesday project – a huge digital archive of life in the 1980s stored on outdated technology which is inaccessible by today's computers.
The project was developed by the BBC to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the 1086 Domesday book.
It formed a social snapshot of life in Britain during the mid-1980s and featured about a million people around the UK.
These included photographe
rs, journalists, academics and researchers, Ordnance Survey map-makers and statisticians at the UK Census bureau.
It also contains video clips from the BBC and ITV companies, schoolchildren at 10,000 schools and other members of the public.
All the information was recorded on two virtually indestructible interactive videodiscs that could be accessed using a special BBC microcomputer system.
But the videodiscs far outlived the computer system, without which they proved useless.
Now researchers working as part of the CAMiLEON project say they have cracked the problem.
They have developed software which emulates the obsolete BBC computer and videodisc player on which the original system ran. The emulator is to be demonstrated at a meeting in Leeds today.
Yesterday student David Greenwell, 24, recalled devoting hours to the BBC Domesday project when he was an infant school pupil in the 1980s.
Mr Greenwell, who is writing up a chemistry PhD at Leeds University, said he has 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," said Mr Greenwell. "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. It would be very interesting to see it all now."
The CAMiLEON project has spent three years developing strategies for digital preservation and testing them with practical preservation work with materials like BBC Domesday.
Project manager Paul Wheatley 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."
Mr Wheatley said estimates varied on how much the database cost to put together. Some people have put it at more than £3m.
