Domesday Book: from 888 parchment folios to four CD-Roms
Henrietta Pearson, Alecto Editions
I am delighted to be here today to speak about the Alecto Domesday project with which I have been involved from the outset in 1985, through all the years of discussing an electronic edition to the final publication of a four CD-ROM set just a few months ago.
In 1985 discussions started with the then keeper of the public records, Professor G. H. Martin, about a high-quality, colour facsimile of the Domesday manuscripts, which would then be available to scholars throughout the world. The two volumes were to be unbound for necessary conservation work and this provided the perfect opportunity to photograph each parchment leaf. This was done using a De Vere overhead copy camera and Fujichrome RDP film, giving us a complete set of 10 x 8 transparencies before the manuscripts were rebound in five volumes for the 900th anniversary in 1986. At that time none of us imagined that in less than twenty years the complete set of folios could be housed on the hard disk of an individuals personal computer.
I shall begin by discussing the early planning stages of the Alecto hard copy editions, as they are relevant to the digital edition. We were being invited to publish one of the most important documents in English history what puzzled us was how to make a text in abbreviated medieval Latin accessible and interesting to an audience beyond the academic world. Alectos research showed that university and state libraries around the world wanted Domesday, but we also knew that there was a large audience throughout England with a strong interest in local history and huge curiosity about the book that was frequently quoted but had rarely been seen. For Alecto the non-academic audience has always been vital as it helps to fund scholarly publication.
Alectos editors, with guidance from the editorial board, decided to publish three separate editions for three different audiences. There were to be two complete editions: one elaborately-bound collectors edition; and an un-bound, cased library edition for scholars. Both were to contain a full system of interpretation comprising new translations, based on the Victoria County History but revised and standardized to take account of new scholarship, new indexes of both people and places, and large scale maps of each county. There was a conscious editorial decision that there should be no commentaries and no opinions that could become dated. It was also a conscious and deliberate editorial decision that our publication was to be the definitive Domesday reference work.
The third, county edition was aimed at a more general audience, and in addition to the basic elements of facsimile, translation, maps and indexes it included an introduction and bibliography for each county and a volume of essays covering different aspects of Domesday and information about life in medieval England.
From the outset we were asked, particularly by the US libraries, about a Domesday database and it was always Alectos intention to provide one, but this could only be done when we had completed the editorial work on both manuscripts. On completion of the first manuscript, we started looking for external funding for Little Domesday and for the electronic edition. Many avenues were investigated in the mid nineties, including the Heritage Lottery Fund, which showed great interest in supporting an electronic version of a document of national importance, and encouraged us, in collaboration with the Public Record Office, to submit a proposal for a web-based programme which would include high-resolution images of the folios. We were rejected.
With the millennium ahead of us it was decided to proceed alone and detailed planning of the electronic publication commenced. There were two other Domesday database projects, both of which had been started before Alecto got involved with Domesday in the nineteen-eighties, so we needed to steer a different course. We were, however, in a special position as we had the original photographic material and, with technological progress in recent years, the dream of general access to high-quality digital images became a reality.
Two of us set up an office to run the project and to research what scholars wanted. The feedback we got was very clear: give us the images; give us all the Alecto text and a really good search engine; keep it simple. Over the years we had talked to many software companies about elaborate interactive portal schemes but we were now working to a tight budget and what was needed was a tried and tested database system and people who were sympathetic to the material with which we were working. We selected System Simulation, in Covent Garden, which had developed Index+, the powerful and robust content management system that has been used in a number of demanding applications, including the British Museum Compass project.
Deciding on content was for us the easy part. The 888 folio images would be accompanied by all the material published with the Alecto facsimile editions translations, indexes, map references and all studies, introductions, notes and a glossary. Having marketed the hard copy publications we had a lot of information about user responses and requirements. Those who had managed to get the books out of the box were enthusiastic about the amount of material and the way in which it was presented. The individual county introductions proved to be extremely popular, and as they had not been issued with the library edition we knew that these texts should be included in the electronic version.
I was lucky enough to recruit a brilliant project manager to work with me. As a New Yorker who had been a theatre manager and set up training programmes in a bank she came in and set up systems to control all editorial and financial aspects of the Digital Domesday project. This was essential, as all the data came through our office. We arranged the high resolution scanning which was supplied on some forty CD-ROMs. All text illustrations had to be scanned. The Farley transcription was photographed digitally so that the main source of reference to Domesday before the Alecto facsimile could be included for comparison. The entire Great Domesday translation was sent to India for data capture and keywords were added to every bibliographic entry. There was a lot of data to control.
We worked closely with the software company at all stages. They trained one of our team to work in-house on their system and she performed a range of tasks such as cutting and checking the images, and adding the links for footnotes and captions in the accompanying text. In the final stages she did all manual corrections to the text. This way of working proved to be both efficient in terms of our control over content and economical as we were not paying the software house for time-consuming data work.
System Simulation came up with a simple and clear overall design for the programme and from the first screen it is apparent what the system will do: it will search for something specific, either a folio number or a word; or the user can browse through the folios, translation or a specific county essay. Search results appear in a list and the user can look at each entry. It is also easy to navigate between folio, transcription and translation. We took considerable trouble over the information section and there is a note to explain every element that has been included. The user can check on editorial conventions for the translation or investigate what the transcription is and when it was printed. Search terms are explained in a How to use section.
We did spend some time considering format. The web was ruled out because of the problems of security and the speed factor when downloading large images, but also because, without outside funding, the project had to pay for itself and I could never see how this would be achieved with a Domesday web product. We considered DVD but found that libraries were not yet using DVD systems on their servers. So, we have published on CD-ROM.
The Digital Domesday is a set of four discs: the first contains all the text and a complete set of medium resolution images; the other three hold the high-resolution images of all 888 Domesday folios. This has provided us with flexibility in that we can offer the single CD on its own to those who do not need to examine the manuscript in detail. In addition to the information section in the programme we provide a slim handbook with information about how to use the Digital Domesday.
Unfortunately the Digital Domesday has not been out for long enough for me to have as much feedback as I would like. Sales to libraries are coming through and there has been a high take up from existing clients for the single CD-ROM, proving that individuals will pay for an important historical publication. We have been complimented on the design and ease with which the programme loads and can be used. The high-resolution images are excellent and really as close as you can get to the manuscript as there is no intervention of a printer. The zoom function is invaluable.
The scholar who has used it most admits that Digital Domesday deals with 95% of his queries but he would like to be taken automatically from the translation to the relevant passage in the folio. This facility would require either manual labour or an automatic system. Any attempts to automate aspects of Domesday have tended to fall down so the user just has to find the relevant paragraph it is not difficult, thanks to the scribes ordered layout of the manuscript. Other requests have been made for the ability to save a search and to make a search within a search. We also omitted the county maps on the grounds of both cost and functionality. There is no doubt that maps would be useful and we could have done more to extract information from the text in order to produce maps of England illustrating things such as population distribution, regional wealth or changes in the value of an entry.
I had hugely underestimated the time required to turn published text into a fully functional electronic format. In conversion so many things can change and line endings become ragged. All notes and conventions had to be rewritten to take account of the way in which they worked on screen. Despite endless beta disks and months of checking there are still errors. Particularly annoying are the missing spaces that mean that the search engine does not always pick up all the occurrences of the search terms.
Finally, it has to be said that we would all like to see Domesday made available for everyone on the web and it is a pity that funding prevented this from happening. However, we have at least provided an easily searchable Domesday text and a digital version of all the images at high resolution which is now housed in The National Archives. In light of the recent museum looting in Iraq we all want to see precious documents stored in as many formats as possible. It has been a huge privilege for me to have been involved with this project from its earliest days and a source of satisfaction for all of us who have been involved to see its final publication.
July 2003
