BBC World Service Radio Archive – online

Posted on: 22 August 2013

The entire archive of the BBC World Service is being made available online. Tristan Ferne and Mark Flashman, BBC Research & Development, look at some of the challenges involved.

About the authors:

Tristan Ferne, Lead Producer, Internet Research & Future Services, BBC Research & Development. Tristan works for a team at BBC R&D where they use technology and design to prototype the future of media and the web. He is the lead producer in the team and has over 15 years experience in web, media and broadcast R&D. Originally an engineer, now a digital producer, he has helped develop many influential prototypes and concepts for the BBC’s Future Media division.
E-mail: tristan.ferne@bbc.co.uk
Twitter: @tristanf

Mark Flashman, BBC Internet Research and Future Services. Mark has worked in various roles at the BBC including Operations Manager at the World Service where he played a leading part in the digitisation of broadcast operations, music reporting, and channel management. He played a significant role in the introduction and development of the first digital programme archive at the BBC, and researched and also wrote SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategies for the BBC’s foreign language teams and. He has recently moved to the BBC’s Internet Research and Future Services team where he is exploring ways to unlock archives using automatically generated and crowd-sourced metadata.
E-mail: mark.flashman@bbc.co.uk
Web: www.bbc.co.uk/rd

 

Introduction
Between 2005 and 2008 the BBC World Service, with much foresight, digitised the contents of its Recorded Programme library. This included what was archived from the English-language radio services over the past 45 years – over 50,000 programmes covering a wide range of subjects from weekly African news reviews covering the events in Sierra Leone as they happened to interviews with Stephen Spielberg. The BBC’s Research & Development department is experimenting with putting this radio archive online for anyone to listen to, but also to help improve it.

Archiving and digitising
In 2005 the shelves of the physical programme archive in Bush House, home to the BBC World Service since 1941, were filling up and the building was to be vacated in a few years time. Something had to be done.

The archive consisted of around 50,000 recorded programmes kept on ¼” tape, DAT and audio CD in the Recorded Programme library. The digitisation project recorded these in real time onto servers as high quality digital audio files, a process taking three years. One of the final parts of the digitisation project was to add any recordings found on shelves in peoples’ offices as they moved out of Bush House. As shelves were emptied, piles of CDs in lever-arch files were found and another 7000 programmes were added. All of these digitised audio files were then automatically linked to the BBC’s in-house information and archives system, Infax, and a simple website was built for BBC staff to search for, preview or download the programmes.

Interestingly, this process led to a significant number of ‘ghost’ programmes in the archive database, ones that appeared in the records but had no recorded audio. There appears to be no single cause for this but we do know that before the advent of digital media and production fewer programmes were archived. The cost of media was a factor and at one point the World Service even had a tape reclamation unit that recycled tape from unused and unwanted spools, wiped it and then stuck it back together for use by others. Programmes were borrowed from the library and never returned, some simply never made it to the archive in the first place and some programmes had been scheduled but outside events like the first Gulf War had intervened and the programmes never broadcast.

The digitisation project was a great success. It made the move to new premises in Broadcasting House much easier and now the archiving process is much simpler, consistent and automated. However, although we had all the programmes digitised as high quality audio the descriptive metadata we had was of limited quality and quantity. Metadata is what describes digital items, without which nothing can be found. So although we might have a programme title and broadcast date we didn’t really know what each programme was about – without listening to it – or indeed the shape and contents of the whole archive.