Opening up the archives
I’m coming very late to this but I have been engaged by – and have learned from – a film made by BBC Research and Development and posted in six parts on their blog across the summer. Opening up the Archives looks at the issues facing the BBC in dealing with its huge television, radio and other collections (such as written materials and photographs) and at some of the solutions being contributed by BBC R&D. The sections are indexed here but since they make it easy to embed I have also brought them across to the blog. The six parts are across the jump, with a few comments from me on each. I should say that I think this is a terrific resource and I’m grateful for BBC R&D for making and posting it.
Ant Miller on the BBC R&D blog explains the context for the 45-minute film, which is presented by Alex Mansfield:
Three years ago now the R&D department founded a dedicated team looking at research to support the archives of the BBC. Based around core long term projects such as PrestoPrime, the group has expanded its portfolio of active projects to cover every element of archives technology, from high performance storage platforms to advanced metadata techniques. At the same time the BBC’s own archive has been transformed by massive programmes of migration, and the ongoing evolution of the broadcast environment, not to mention an increased appreciation of the value of archives as public resources.
Part one is a general introduction, with contributions from – among others – Mark Thompson, former Director-General (now at The New York Times), and Roly Keating, former Director of Archive Content (now at The British Library), as well as Bill Thompson, Head of Partnership Development, BBC Information & Archives. The essential quote is probably Roly’s: “The key thing is to find more and more ways to render content available to people.”
2. Keeping ahead of obsolescence
On the necessity of digitisation, the problems of formats that are no longer supported (like DAT and D3) and the solution provided by the Ingex programme – but the further issue of quality control checking of the digitised material; with interviews with Dr Richard Wright, Adrian Williams of I&A and Tom Heritage and Tim Borer, both of BBC R&D.
3. Future proofing
On the dangers of ‘catastrophic’ failure of files in the digitised archive, the issue of ‘bit rot’ and the obsolescence cycle of the digital world (which is faster than the analogue equivalent).
4. A strategy for the industry
Dr Richard Wright speaks about preservation planning for the BBC archive and about the relationship of the BBC’s approach with that of other broadcasters – and asks the question, ‘What is this archive good for?’, not just for the BBC but for a much wider public.
5. Finding the content
Metadata, metadata, metadata – and the challenge of working with the information contained in more than eighty years of Radio Times.
6. Finding new kinds of metadata
Bill Thompson talks briefly about the importance of capturing and cataloguing the memories of those who worked at the BBC but the main focus here is the creation of ‘mood metadata’ both from tagging by viewers and by various machine inference systems. Clearly this is cutting-edge work but I have to say that it’s also the area of research outlined in these six films that I was least convinced by. I genuinely don’t understand just how this ‘mood metadata’ going to help me and others access the archive in the future?
Towards the end, Roly Keating talks about the future significance of the annotation of the archive. And as Mark Thompson says,
The greatest experts on our archive often turn out to be the public – and I think engaging and inspiring the public to look at our archive and to tell us about it… to give their wisdom and knowledge about the archive but also their enthusiasm, their recommendations about the archive, that kind of Wikipedia approach of sharing the task of unearthing these treasures with the public is a very powerful idea.
Image: archive shelving at the BBC supplied by Ecospace.
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