The Research and Education Space

Connecting the UK’s publicly held archives to inspire new ways of learning 

The Research and Education Space (RES) is a partnership project between Jisc, the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) and the BBC that aims to make the UK’s publicly-held archive collections digitally available to UK students, teachers and researchers.

The RES project began in January 2013. Since its inception we have worked with our project partners to enhance teaching and learning by providing access to educational audiovisual resources that are pedagogically framed, easy to find and simple to use.

Research and Education Space and Box of Broadcasts (RES-BoB)

Duration: January 2013 – January 2014

Funded by: Jisc

In recognition of our experience delivering secure and reliable access to broadcast media under ERA licence terms, RES started with the ‘RES-BoB’ project. This project upgraded the Box of Broadcasts (BoB) service, providing a link between BoB and the BBC broadcast media archive.

From January 2014 BoB users have been able to gain online access to a collection of 800,000 BBC television and radio programmes dating back to 2007. The project also drew on the expertise of members of the HE and FE community, setting priorities for the digitisation of pre-2007 material to include in the archive.

Our involvement led to the following:

• We have provided authenticated BoB users in HE, FE and schools with online access to the entire post-2007 BBC media archive, 800,000 records in total, under the terms and conditions of the ERA licence.
• We have upgraded BoB, providing new features and improving the user experience.
• We have digitised a large quantity of post-1989 audiovisual material that was designated as ‘high priority’ by an academic panel.

BBC Shakespeare Archive Resource

Duration: November 2015 – January 2016

During 2015 and early 2016 we worked with the BBC to make over 500 Shakespeare-related TV and radio programmes from the BBC archive accessible via BoB. The content, some of it dating back to the 1950s, includes Shakespeare’s plays, poems and sonnets as well as documentaries on the Bard’s work. The material from the BBC archive has been digitised so that BoB users in universities, colleges and schools can easily access this wealth of educationally rich TV and radio content. For information on how to access this content through BoB email us at bob@bufvc.ac.uk.

Hetty Malcolm-Smith is the BUFVC’s Project Manager for the RES Project.

Related links:

Research and Education Space project, BBC website

Research and Education Space project, Jisc website

BBC Shakespeare Archive Resource, BBC website

Blog post on Research Education Space project, Jisc website

The Guardian, 6 January 2013 – article on BBC initiative and project