SecretLeeds - History, culture and architecture in Leeds

Well, 1986 anyway!I don't think I've seen these BBC webpages mentioned on here before, please accept my apologies if I'm raking over old ground but I thought they might be of interest:http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday/d ... icture/2In 1986 the BBC launched an ambitious project to record a snapshot of everyday life across the UK for future generations. A million volunteers took part.In 2011 the BBC published the survey online and for six months invited updates to the photographs and text to celebrate the 25th anniversary. Shortly afterwards the website was added to The National Archives’ UK Government Web Archive.The link I've posted above takes you to thoughts, musings and pictures of Cross Gates / Whitkirk and Colton in 1986. There is a search function that i don't have time to explore right now, but clearly there is a lot more Leeds (and beyond) material on there.

That's an interesting link raveydavey.I found the following interesting items in an 1985 entry under Sainsbury's Shopping Centre in North Leeds:-"THE LIBRARY owns 67000 books (l-2 lost weekly) with l000 users. £250 in fines are paid weekly. It is the busiest library in Leeds; it caters for every age group. 20 librarians work there. THE PENNY FUN (pub) - uses 25 barrels of beer weekly, with 70 regulars. In 1985 a pint of bitter costs 73p. 20 people work there."    

What a waste that Doomsday project was.It was intended to involve loads of schoolchildren and it was supposed to be a searchable record that would be made available to schools.In the end they put it on laserdiscs - dead end format - when it was obvious that it would not last. The schools needed to buy expensive players and means to interrogate the discs, all horrendously expensive - so few shelled out.The public could also buy the discs, it was even more expensive and by the time they came out nobody was interested in laserdiscs - accessing information was incredibly slow too.You could not use a regular computer to access those discs because the systems were incompatible - some geeks eventually did a workaround but by then the project was almost forgotten.The quality of information was extremely patchy, some groups did a really good job of it, others just submitted a few lines of text, some did nothing at all - there wasn't a standardised format. The information is pretty rubbish IMHO but a lot of this was caused by the limitations of the system - there just wasn't much space for images and none for videosSee if you can identify this imagehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday/dblock/G ... cture/3The main interest probably lies in the fact that it was done at all, because the whole project was pretty poor, very amateurish with no quality control on the information.I don't imagine that the extent of the internet today had been envisaged, but if it were done today I would expect something laid out along the lines of Wikipeadia would be a good model - but with some videos - right now pretty much everything you would need is around somewhere on the net, but scattered all over the place.

electricaldave wrote: See if you can identify this imagehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday/dblock/G ... /picture/3 Chancellor Wing and one of the old hospital blocks at St James' from Beckett Street.I was in that 'old' block at the age of nineteen in March 1970. All I could see from the window that my bed was next to was one of the two pubs across the road. Pity it wasn't the Fountain Head then. You're right. It was the Cemetery.Didn't fill me with hope at the time but I got better in spite of it.BBC made a b****r of it. No marks there.    

electricaldave wrote: It was intended to involve loads of schoolchildren and it was supposed to be a searchable record that would be made available to schools.In the end they put it on laserdiscs - dead end format - when it was obvious that it would not last. The schools needed to buy expensive players and means to interrogate the discs, all horrendously expensive - so few shelled out.The public could also buy the discs, it was even more expensive and by the time they came out nobody was interested in laserdiscs - accessing information was incredibly slow too.You could not use a regular computer to access those discs because the systems were incompatible - some geeks eventually did a workaround but by then the project was almost forgotten. I'd guess laserdiscs were used because of the relatively high amount of data that could be stored on them (for the time) - don't forget that the best selling computer then was the ZX Spectrum with a whole 48k of memory...On an non-entirely unrelated note, a lad I was at school withs dad went on 'Sale of the Century' ("Live from Norwich, it's the quiz of the week") and won a Philips Laser Disc system in the early 80's. I remember even then that the discs were fantastically expensive and the range to buy was very limited.     

If they had simply printed it in a paper encyclopaedia it would have been less troublesome and far easier to transfer to a digital format.That's the thing with paper, it is very compatible with lots of things, and we have stuff that is readable from thousands of years ago - digital is all very well, but look what happened the other day with the bank machines not working right - I never had any problem with good old fashioned paper money. I never found a place that will not take money, unlike Debit cards.

But it did help introduce acorn computers into schools. Like most early stuff it was flawed but its what it kick started is more important, a bit like the raspberry pi computer that is being rolled out in schools now.