BBC Domesday project relaunched

You can now take a virtual trip down memory lane and tour life in the UK as it was in 1986.

The BBC Domesday Project, a national project carried out between 1984 and 1986 to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book, has been resurrected by the National Archives.

Schools in Britain collected information about the communities in which they lived and text and photographs were recorded onto a videodisc that initially provided over 50,000 photographs and 250,000 screens of text.

However, when the BBC Domesday system was created it ran on a "BBC Micro" computer and was connected to the Phillips LV-ROM laserdisc player. But few working systems have survived and the LV-ROM technology is now obsolete.

A new DVD version gathers the original domesday content and has some new features that were not available on the original system.

David Ryan, head of archive services at The National Archives, said: "The 1986 BBC Domesday Project was a ground-breaking educational resource in its day. Domesday Community takes the system out of the history books into the public domain once again."