BBC Domesday Project
crowdsourced born-digital description of the UK, published in 1986
The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers, 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 has been 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". The project also incorporated professionally prepared video footage, virtual reality tours of major landmarks and other prepared datasets such as the 1981 census. Over a million people participated in the project, including children from more than 9,000 schools.
Purpose
Initially estimated to require the involvement of 10,000 schools and about one million children, the intention was to make the role of schools central in a data gathering project that would assign each school to a geographical area, have parents and local societies collect data, with the schools "acting as a focus and providing the computer". Questionnaires about geography, amenities and land use were to be completed, with school pupils and other contributors also able to write about their local area and "the issues affecting them" in their own words.
In the context of the educational relevance of microcomputers and of information retrieval software operating on repositories of data that might potentially be built by children, it was felt that:
It is in the handling of data that children can best develop an understanding of what counts for knowledge.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “BBC Domesday Project” is crowdsourced born-digital description of the UK, published in 1986. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Domesday, Project and crowdsourced, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “crowdsourced born-digital description of the UK, published in 1986” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4834807. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1984, 1986 and 1981.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “BBC Domesday Project” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.