The British Library possesses the play register, the 'script' against which city officers checked that each guild's play was being correctly performed. The York Doomsday project is taking advantage of the latest developments in multimedia computing to create a collection of texts, images, sound, and video, which will give evidence not only for the play itself and its performance but for the wider culture out of which it came. The project is directed by Professor Meg Twycross of the University of Lancaster and Professor Pamela M. King of the University College of St Martin, Lancaster. It received a major British Academy award for 1995-6, and the British Library has been providing substantial support in the scanning of material for the project. Multimedia not only provides access to high quality images of the manuscripts recording the history of the play, it enables links to be made to videos of modern performances, maps showing the route of the pageant and even reconstructions of pageant waggons.
Hyperlinks also provide a means of showing the context of the play more effectively.
They were a closely knit community who played a key role in the city government and the organisation of its major civic event, the Corpus Christi Play. Only hypertext can begin to represent this web of connections and aspirations. During July of this year, the Project's Research Officer, Paul Williams, came to the Library and worked with Andrew Prescott and David French of the Library's Manuscript Collections to scan material for the archive, using the ProgRes 3012 camera acquired for the Electronic Beowulf project. Among the manuscripts scanned were part of the register of the play itself, the York Bakers' accounts, and a Yorkshire manuscript of a fifteenth-century devotional text, The Lay Folks' Catechism. The project is negotiating with the keepers of various archives in York for a selection of their material to be scanned at Boston Spa using the Kontron camera.