The BBC Genome Project
Andy O'Dwyer, BBC Archives
Tuesday 25 October, 6.15pm, Anatomy Museum. Followed by drinks.
The BBC is planning to publish online its broadcast history going back to 1922 when it was founded. The objective over time is to allow the public to search, discover and read about the BBC’s output across radio and television in novel and exciting ways.
To achieve this, over 80 years of the back catalogue of the BBC’s scheduling magazine, the Radio Times has been scanned. This amounts to approximately 400,000 pages which have had optical character recognition (OCR) applied so that key information such as the broadcast date, channel, programme title, contributors and other associated information printed in the Radio Times can be captured and made ready for the web.
This presentation gives in detail the background work that has gone into making this happen including a pilot project with two years of the Radio Times. The lessons learned from this pilot will also be explained including the eventual workflow from the planning and preparation stage, through to the bulk scanning process.
When this significant amount of data is placed online it is going to be a useful reference asset for academic and educational use. This online resource also has the potential to act as a central point to link related programme information such as photographs, scripts and audio-visual material.
Register for this event: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2181928206
About the speaker
Andy O’Dwyer is a Technologist/Project Manager at the BBC, working on digitisation and access to audiovisual collections. He is active on a number of EU collaborative projects to bring archives online for public and academic use, such as www.axes-project.eu and www.euscreen.eu . As a member of the Television Studies Commission of FIAT, www.fiatifta.org, he promotes new techniques in linking audiovisual material with the education sector. He is a member of the European Television History Network, http://cms.hum.uu.nl/ethn. Plus a contributing author of the book 'A European Television History'.
More about the BBC Genome Project: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/2010/08/bbc-genome-the-complete-broadc.shtml