Spoilt
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It shouldn’t be too surprising that the project is being driven by passionate advocates within the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The organisation, which has been broadcasting since 1922, has accumulated around three million TV broadcast items, untold hours of local, national and international radio broadcast hours and holds the world’s largest collections of sheet music and music recordings – and that’s just the start. As the country’s first provider of broadcasting services for public consumption, it also has reams of historic meeting notes, records of technological advancement, scripts, invoices, letters of praise and complaint, viewing data and other material that offers a unique insight into the national story and the stories of other nations too.
The archive presents endless opportunities in developing new avenues for research and exciting propositions within teaching and learning. However, the beauty of opening up the BBC archives is also the unique, spontaneous reactions to this content. Through the richness presented in BBC archives we can gain new insight into a discipline or subject that may not have been explored previously.
Controller of BBC archive development Tony Ageh explains: “The BBC World Service’s archive has possibly more historical information about recent conflicts and developments around the world than exists anywhere else.
“We also have hundreds and hundreds of hours of coverage of sporting events, and many, many hours of wildlife, but that might be really valuable if you want to draw a lifelike image of the animal. Making this stuff more readily available may well do some real good.”
Tony Ageh
Controller of BBC archive development
If you are studying recent social history, the conversation of sports commentators with hours to fill may offer masses of useful period detail and if you want to study the behaviour of a snow leopard watching it over several hours may be a rare opportunity to gain new insight.
The potential benefits to academia of this content are obvious, if unexplored. And that’s where Jisc comes in. We’ve worked with the BBC and other organisations with rich archives – including the Wellcome Trust, British Library and the Arts Council – for several years through the Strategic Content Alliance and we share the BBC’s ambition to make content readily available.
Redefining the raw material
The BBC has already carried out a small-scale pilot in partnership with Jisc and the BUFVC, licensing and digitising 300 hours of regional broadcasts from BBC Northern Ireland. The experience proved that the technology worked, the legal barriers could be overcome – and that the result would be fascinatingly unpredictable.
Tony Ageh said: “By making raw material available we enable people to make what they will from it. That’s a huge challenge in terms of making it accessible and searchable, because what we think the programme is about will no longer necessarily be what the researchers think it’s about.”
And he cites an example – an interview with 70s New Wave band The Undertones, which elicited a wealth of feedback on local geography and infrastructure of the period.
So this year Jisc, the BBC and the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) are working on a collaboration called the Research Education Space (RES), in which we aim to create a sustainable digital content collection of BBC broadcast assets from August 1989 onwards, and to make all this available online in Autumn 2013 through the existing BUFVC Box of Broadcasts (BoB) service.
Why focus on the most recent material?
There are many hurdles along the road to making the DPS vision a reality: not the least of these is a legal one. In many cases, the rights to broadcast material are not vested in the BBC – sports programming is a prime example.
But the post-August 1989 material is covered by the Educational Recording Agency (ERA) licensing scheme, allowing UK educational institutions from schools to prisons to pay a fee and use the material in a classroom context. By focusing on this material and getting the technology, the metadata and the long-term sustainability right, we hope to prove that the ultimate goal is both valuable and achievable.
And in this, the BUFVC’s BoB service is absolutely crucial. BoB is a shared off-air recording and media archive, which is currently used by 48 higher education and further education organisations. Two high priorities are the need to find a way to increase the ease of access to broadcasts and to authenticate those who access them. Because BoB is a BUFVC-membership service, both of these aims should be met more easily.
The first phase of the RES project is underway now, establishing a robust technical link-up between the BBC and the BUFVC so that BoB can access the material it does not already hold, when it is requested by BoB subscribers.
“This initiative has enormous potential for learning, teaching and research because there will be easy access to a large amount of the BBC’s holdings. This, together with the 120,000 programmes already available within BoB, adds up to a lot of content, with the potential to be viewed, clipped, and re-used across many academic subjects.”
Luis Carrasqueiro
BUFVC chief executive
Five principles to underpin the Digital Public Space
Long-term sustainability of the material – it needs to be future-proofed against formats becoming obsolete
Detailed metadata needs to be available for every object
Freedom of access and use in education and research
Open technical standards
Trustworthy management of user data
Catherine Grout, Jisc’s programme director, e-content, said: “To decide what happens next and how this content is best presented we’re setting up a steering group to look into what material people are using and how, and to develop case studies to demonstrate the potential.
“It’s going to be hugely exciting as we decide where to take the project next and work to expand it out to cover more of the BBC’s archive and potentially the archives of other organisations too – I’d urge anyone who is interested to get in touch to find out more and discover how they can play a part.”
