BBC Domesday Project: almost a lesson learned?
Good news. The BBC have got the Domesday Project online. After 25 years, you can finally read content via the web that was previously only available on BBC Master computers with expensive Laser Disc players. The irony of creating a new digital project to celebrate the anniversary of the Domesday Book and it not being accessible a decade later while the original Domesday Book was still readable over 900 years later was not lost on anyone.
But what about today? Surely, the BBC could learn from this 25-year-old error that the solution is openness and replication. The Domesday Project is an ideal candidate for being released as free content. This really is public domain material at its finest. If they release it without the encumberance of strict copyright protection (one presumes the contributors agreed to granting the BBC copyright on the material), the whole world can participate in keeping it well archived. I’m sure the Internet Archive would take a copy, as would Wikisource/Wikimedia Commons, as would some commercial operators like Google, and probably a few major libraries. The Domesday Project is a major historical achievement.
And the fact that, against all odds, they’ve managed to put it online, shows the absurdity of the BBC’s “content lifecycle” policy, which I’ve discussed here. The BBC are celebrating bringing the Domesday Project, a citizen-contributed encyclopedia (the first incarnation of Wikipedia?), back to life, even while they shut down the website of citizen-contributed stories of World War II. Can the left hand at the BBC please send a memo to the right hand?
It is time for the BBC to face up to their new role. They aren’t just licence-fee-funded educator, entertainer and informer, they are also a licence-fee-funded archiving organisation. And the free content and open source community would so love to help them.
The BBC has those Reithian values of educate, inform, educate.
Wikimedia’s mission is creating “a world where every human being can share in the sum of all knowledge”.
The Internet Archive’s mission is “universal access to all knowledge”.
Those crazy radical free content types out there on the Internet share those same Reithian values. All that gets in the way is some dog-eared, obsolete protectionist legal regulations designed to keep Disney in business by keeping knowledge and creativity from passing into the public domain.
To the BBC, I say, what’s a bit of copyright between friends? Free the Domesday Project and it can last as long as the Domesday Book. Keep it locked away in copyright chains and the Domesday Project will die next time a budget cut comes along and you need to clear out the top-level domain space to save a few pennies according to your out-dated “content lifecycle”.
Tags: bbc domesday project
