Brian Smith of briansmithonline.com has kindly donated a folder of documentation, letters and newspaper cuttings about the BBC Domesday Project to The Centre for Computing History
Wikipedia says the following about The Domesday Project.
The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers Ltd, Philips, Logica and the BBC (with some funding from the European Commission’s ESPRIT programme) to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th century census of England. It is frequently cited as an example of digital obsolescence on account of the physical medium used for data storage.
This new multimedia edition of Domesday was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986. It included a new ‘survey’ of the United Kingdom, in which people, mostly school children, wrote about geography, history or social issues in their local area or just about their daily lives. This was linked with maps, and many colour photos, statistical data, video and ‘virtual walks’. Over 1 million people participated in the project. The project also incorporated professionally-prepared video footage, virtual reality tours of major landmarks and other prepared datasets such as the 1981 census.
