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BIRTH specific questions:
What is the responsibility of your organisation within the Project? The BBC has a number of roles within the project. We are responsible for identifying the user specification requirements and the preservation and restoration strategies to be employed over the course of the project.
To ensure the project website can be used by as many people as possible it is important to find out the way users currently access and view content online. In conjunction with other partners in the project the BBC have carried out an extensive survey to evaluate how and where users currently connect to the internet. Data has been collected on the type and speed of connection used and the choice of software adopted for viewing video and audio. In addition likely users of the website have been asked about the type of content they would expect to see.
Another responsibility of the BBC is to identify the most appropriate restoration techniques required to make sure the older material which may be damaged or worn out can be preserved and made available for inclusion in the project. It is likely that both film, audio and documents from the earliest days will need to be inspected, assessed and have decisions made as to the best course of action for restoration. When this work has been carried out these items will be digitised to the most appropriate format for long term preservation and access. The BBC has had a lot of experience in this area and in the process of transferring a large part of their own archives to modern digital formats.

Directory Information:
Public Access - link
http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/
Professional Access - link
BBC Worldwide: Programme & Clip sales
http://www.bbcworldwide.com/

Organisation Type:
The BBC is a public service broadcaster working in all areas of the media, radio, television, internet, and print around the world.

Description of organisation:
The BBC was given its first royal charter in 1927 and this ran for 10 years. The BBC was funded in part by licences which the public bought to receive radio broadcasts. By 1932 over four and a half million licences had been sold.

The television service began in November 1936. Between then and 1939 the BBC provided a mixture of news, entertainment and outside broadcasts.

In September 1939 television broadcasting closed down due to the war and resumed again in June 1946.

It was in 1964 that the BBC started a second television channel (BBC2) and transmitted in colour on this second channel in 1967.

From these early pioneering days of television, the BBC has grown into a much larger organisation offering a diverse amount of output across all forms of media. The traditional radio and television services offered by the BBC have been enhanced by the development of digital channels, interactive services and the internet. This has made the BBC more accessible to it'';s audience both at home and abroad.
http://www.bbcworldwide.com/


BBC Worldwide Woodlands 80 Wood Lane London W12 0TT UK

Tel: + 44 (0) 20 8433 2000 Fax: + 44 (0) 20 8749 0538

Greenwich Mean Time & British Summer Time:

Audience served The BBC serves the widest possible audience both in the UK and abroad. With the increase in digital platforms, and new channels the BBC has been able to offer a wide range of services across radio, TV and the internet.

The BBC's presence on the internet has grown enormously over the last few years giving our audiences increasing choice, information and services.

Conditions for use
Educational and academic access to some BBC content is available through the National Film & Television Archive. http://www.bfi.org.uk/collections/rvs/index.html

Collection size
The BBC's archive collection is vast and covers all media from film, radio, records, video cassettes, books and sheet music.
Along with traditional formats the archives is also engaged in capturing BBC content from online services. To keep a record of it's output for future generations.

Collection and Genre strength
The archive collection at the BBC encompasses most genres. These fall into many categories and below are examples.

News
Entertainment
Culture / Arts
Education
Documentaries
History
Sport

The collection which is made up from television, radio, music, photos and documents are used extensively for research by programme makers. They have access to these services online at their desktop. This service is supported by the Information & Archives department who also offer more specialist research and loan out books, records and documents.

Preservation activities
The BBC is engaged in a number of activities to preserve the collection. - A lot of the content is being digitised for long term preservation and catalogued to allow for better exploitation.

In co-operation with other European broadcasters the BBC has joined a number of projects investigating new methods for preserving older material and making it available on modern file based formats.

Cataloguing activities
BBC Information & Archives manages a range of archive databases which are used to catalogue different sorts of media - documents, music, still images, television and radio material. The majority of these are available at the BBC desktop to all programme makers via I&A's research portal research.gateway. It is difficult to describe each of these in detail but the main archive database is Infax which holds information pertaining to radio, television and commercial music recordings. Infax holds the following types of metadata:

• descriptive content metadata e.g. shotlists
• production metadata e.g. production credits
• transmission information e.g. programme title and transmission date
• technical content metadata e.g. subtitled versions
• carrier metadata e.g. tape format A limited amount of rights information is also held on Infax. An electronic feed is taken of transformation metadata from the BBC transmission system, PICS. Technical content and carrier metadata are managed by the department, Television Intake (part of I&A).

Descriptive content and production metadata are typed in manually by cataloguers using other sources of programme information.

15% of BBC television output is viewed by cataloguers and fully shotlisted into Infax. The vast majority (85%) of television output is catalogued and indexed manually using the BBC production information database P4A which holds core documents called PasCs listing copyright and billings information for programmes. Listings magazines are also used for cataloguing and indexing non-viewed material.

Material is subject indexed using a controlled vocabulary in the form of a classification scheme based on Universal Decimal Classification. This is used to index programme genres as well. It is a national and hierarchical classification scheme, which has been developed by the BBC over a number of years. Infax is a union catalogue made up of sub catalogues according to genre or origin of transmission e.g. the subcat LONPROG means that a programme has been transmitted and catalogued in London.

Infax has two versions - a database version used by librarians for cataloguing and research purposes; a web browser version for research by programme makers available on research.gateway.

Librarians for TV output are divided into 3 core teams in London - News (Research & Cataloguing), Television Archive Research and a core cataloguing team for network transmissions and selecting stockshots from rushes material.

In addition, TV Intake handles all incoming material to the archive and checks the components associated with each programme, adding in unique accession numbers for each component to be kept in the archive.

Public service contact
The public contact the BBC for a variety of reasons and the BBC has a specific website to help direct people to the most appropriate department.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/contactus/

Homepage URL
http://www.bbc.co.uk