In response to growing demand for film and sound resources in education and research, we are collaborating on a project with the BBC and the BUFVC to make a wide range of licensed audio visual assets available to UK researchers and teaching staff.

Blog: Towards a Research Education Space

The Research and Education Space will enable teaching staff to use compelling and interesting resources that engage students, giving them the quality experience they expect. Researchers will also be able to exploit the potential of these film, television and radio resources and develop new avenues of knowledge and research.

From November 2013, phase one of the Research and Education Space project will make 800,000 BBC audio visual archives dating from 1989 available to users of the BUFVC’s BoB (Box of Broadcasts) National service under the terms and conditions of the ERA licence (s).

Users will benefit from the development of the BoB National service which will include:

• Access to unique and previously inaccessible content from the BBC archive and other broadcasters dating back to 1989
• A new interface to enable users to intuitively browse, search and assemble playlists from a wide range of broadcasts
• Infrastructure upgrades that will improve service reliability and performance.

Subsequent phases will expand the range of digital content available to education and research by aggregating data and content from a range of providers. This wider vision has potential to deliver benefits such as enhanced access to a range of archives to all UK learners, researchers, teachers and academics.

Through our engagement with researchers and teaching staff, we hope to learn more about content use in education and research and how to improve content presentation in the future.