My job is awesome*

I work in the BBC’s Archive Development department. When I tell people this, I’m usually asked one of two questions, depending upon whether the individual concerned works for the BBC or not. If they do, the question is “what, DMI?”; if they don’t, the question is often “what, at that new place in Perivale or wherever?”.

The truth is neither of those things are correct. Archive Development is based in Television Centre (although I work in Glasgow most of the time), and is concerned mainly with partnership projects between other organisations, as well as other parts of the BBC, which make portions of the archives available to people, quite often the public. Our mission, if I can get away with saying we have a “mission”, is to get the most out of the BBC’s vast archives on behalf of the public.

Before I go further: my usual disclaimer applies. If it turns out I’ve misinterpreted some announcement, don’t blame me. The values of shares can go down as well as up. Your home may be at risk if you do not keep up repayments on a mortgage or other loan secured on it.

Archive Development doesn’t tend to take credit for much — we’re a stealthy bunch — but we have involvement in lots of things, most of which I unfortunately can’t talk about (they are very cool, though). Over the last few week, my colleagues and I have been talking about the BBC Archives in general, and some of the things we’re doing in Archive Development specifically.

In the Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast, Bill Thompson, who is Head of Partnerships in Archive Development, talked about our plans for a “digital public space”. Also featured in the podcast were Richard Ranft from the British Library, and Francesca Franchi from the Royal Opera House — both partners in our Digital Public Space project — and Jill Cousins from Europeana, which is a similar-but-different pan-European effort (and one we’re aligning efforts with where possible).

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at Over The Air 2011 about the Digital Public Space project, and then blogged about it for the BBC. Bill also blogged about partnerships and how other organisations fit with the BBC into a big picture.

Jake Berger, who is Programme Manager for the Digital Public Space project (and conveniently my line manager — exciting fact for you) blogged today about the “umbrella” data model we’ve been collating, and includes an enticing screenshot from a prototype interface that MetaBroadcast built for us.

Tony Ageh, Controller of Archive Development (alternately: “the boss”), posted his speech from the 63rd Prix Italia conference, which talks a little more about the aspirations behind this effort.

Meanwhile, Helen Papadopoulos gave an update on one of our other projects: Genome. Genome is a project to digitise the entire back-catalogue of Radio Times issues (all the way back to 1923) so that we have a great big database of every programme we at least intended to broadcast.

Over in Research and Development, John Zubrzycki talked about multimedia classification, and was followed up with a post by Sam Davies.

Speaking of Perivale, Sarah Hayes, who is Controller of Information & Archives at the BBC, has written up a piece about the new BBC Archive Centre there.

While all of this was going on, JISC announced Chronicle — a project to make available BBC Northern Ireland’s television news from the 60s and 70s.

And finally, Mark Thompson — Director General of the BBC — announced the detailed proposals which make up the Delivering Quality First initiative, which was introduced as:

This is a plan for a BBC with clear priorities and an uncompromising commitment to putting quality first.

A smaller and radically reshaped BBC, yet still able to command the talent, technology and resources it needs to deliver the best broadcasting in the world.

A BBC ready to partner with others to build a shared digital public space.

A BBC which, in uncertain times for audiences and media alike, is more determined than ever to bring the best to everyone.

While it is the case that the BBC is under enormous financial pressure and has all kinds of difficult decisions to make, it’s been made clear that the goal of opening up the archives is important to the future of the corporation, and partnering with other organisations—particularly other public-sector organisations, many of whom are trying to figure out how to get the most out of their own archives—is the best way to achieve that.

* Credit to the snappy title goes to a friend (who shall remain nameless); nevertheless, I’m a shameless thief, sorry.