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As I type this David Hodgkiss from Staffordshire University is putting together a real ´óÏó´«Ã½ Domesday Machine right here in the newsroom. Hopefully it will all be working tonight as we demonstrate it live on the show.

The Domesday Project was a fascinating idea. To document the lives of ordinary Britons in 1986. Over a million people took part in the project and you can read all about it here.

But in technological terms Domesday is perhaps most famous for what it didn't achieve. All that hard work was effectively lost as the technology used to record the information rapidly became obsolete. The laser discs used to record all the information never really caught on and the machines needed to read them were prohibitively expensive. In today's terms the same price as a small family car. All that effort apparently lost in a digital dustbin.

This isn't just a problem for the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s Domesday project. I spent a fascinating few hours with Joanna Terry of the Staffordshire Archive Service. She showed me beautiful paper architectural drawings that are hundreds of years old. Yet ironically if someone wanted to leave a modern set of blueprints to the archive that would be quite a problem

"That's the one where I think, oh help! I need to call IT"

Digital data is often bound up in proprietary formats as is often the case with modern blueprints or like Domesday in formats that have become obsolete. And as people like Joanna plan how to deal with these problems in the future there are plenty of others who are trying to rescue what was thought to be lost already.

That's what happened with Domesday and that's why it's back. If you want to know more you could start . At it's new home you can search the archive and also help update it. So if you and your school or your WI group helped contribute back in the 80's now you can finally see the results of all your hard work.

Did you take part in the Domesday Project? Let us know if you find something you contributed.