At the BUFVC AGM in December 2011, we announced that we would be embarking on the creation of a trial off-air recording union catalogue and asked for participants from UK HE and FE institutions. So, what have we been up to since then?

• 14 HE/FE institutions provided us with data, which comes in at a total of over 43,000 off-air recording records.
• Due to the high volume of records, we prioritised the first eight institutions to send us data to populate the trial union catalogue database.
• We cleansed the majority of post-2001 data that came in. This included supplying information where missing, making dates/channels uniform, separating out series entries into individual programmes, checking for any inconsistencies etc. This work has been completed for approx. 30,000 records.
• Where records could not be enhanced with information from our TRILT database (mainly for pre-1995 data) – we have added content descriptions, genre, credits and other data. This amounts to some 4,300 records.

We now have a 70% match rate with TRILT and can now concentrate on titles where no match could be made (mainly records from 1995-May 2001 where TRILT data is incomplete).

What we envisage for the Union Catalogue

We have built a first test interface and are successively adding the cleaned/enhanced data. Once the functionality and display is tried and tested, this interface will help facilitate the imagined benefits of a union catalogue.

These include:

1. Short term: informing disposal policies, so before an institution disposes of a recording it could ascertain whether it is unique, rare, common, very common – thus enabling an institution to prioritise how it releases shelf space.
2. Medium-term: enabling the BUFVC to establish an analogue of the UK Research Reserve (http://www.ukrr.ac.uk/) for off-air recordings. Details of this will depend on success of the trial.
3. Long-term: facilitating an online interlibrary loan/copying system for off-air recordings. This would again depend on the success of the trial.

Find our more about the Shared Services project here.