Back in 1986, shortly after the announcement that Swindon Works would close, the BBC launched an ambitious and hugely innovative history project. They would use fledgling information technology to document the landscape of the UK. The project was called Domesday, after the 1086 book of the same name produced 900 years earlier. The BBC divided the UK up in to 23,000 blocks and invited school children around the country to produce images and short stories for each. It was a hugely ambitious project but successful in many ways in demonstrating the potential of modern technology, if not the ease of use and accessibility we have become accustomed to today with tools such as Wikipedia and Swindon Viewpoint.

Once the information had been collected by the BBC it was distributed to schools in a custom format that modern machines are unable to read. After years of work by avid technologists the images and stories collected as part of this project have been converted in to a format where they can be shared on the web. The BBC has made this available under their Domesday Reloaded website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday

There are some 7 blocks covering the Swindon area which you can explore by visiting http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/domesday/search?q=swindon,swindon&type=Place

We've added one of the new style twitter list widgets to our site showing a feed of news and updates from popular local sources.

The widgets are really easy to create and pretty flexible, giving you up to the minute updates as they happen.

You can see our widget on our existing twitter page.

Many regular users are already subscribed to our twitter feed to get our own updates as new videos and images are added to the Swindon Viewpoint online archive. If you'd like to join them then why not follow us too!

If you'd like to be included in our Swindon feed or can recommend other local organisations who should be, just let us know.

And we've also got mugs available: