BBC Shakespeare

Posted on: 21 April 2016

Research and Education Space

Now, back to the Research and Education Space (RES) http://res.space – an initiative to improve access to public collections and archives for use in education and research. Imagine someone told you that you were allowed to use all the programmes broadcast on TV and radio since 1989 in your education and research – from your teacher showing you a clip, to watching a whole programme in your lesson, to you using a clip to demonstrate an argument you were making in an essay. Then imagine someone told you that there was a really simple system in your school, college or university which allowed you to do all that and, as well as all that TV and radio, there were also vast numbers of other supporting documents, photos, and video and audio assets available to you from places like the British Library and the British Museum, as well as local galleries and museums. That’s what RES is working to enable.

…RES is an initiative to improve access to public collections and archives for use in education and research

RES is a partnership between Jisc, the BUFVC and the BBC which works with teachers, students and academics, to find out what they use and want to use in teaching and research. RES also works with curators of world class digital collections to make their catalogues and the assets they describe available to the RES project.

The BBC has built an open platform that indexes and organises the digital collections of libraries, museums, broadcasters and galleries to make their content more discoverable, accessible and usable. Images, TV and radio programmes and documents from organisations such as The British Museum, the British Library, the National Archives, Europeana and the Wellcome Trust are all being indexed by the RES platform. This then allows RES to work with the people who make educational products, to encourage them to make use of the collections that are included in RES and incorporate this into existing and new products.

The BBC is therefore both a partner in the RES initiative and a contributor of material to it. The BBC’s Shakespeare collection is the first thematic collection the BBC has made available to the RES project. What that means is that we have released an open catalogue in the form of linked open data about Shakespeare. The power of our collection is greatly enhanced by being linked to other collections, and products powered by the RES platform that can provide a much richer set of related learning materials for teachers and researchers to use.