BBC Connected Histories

Since 1922 the BBC has been where Britain learns about itself and the world. It is a cultural institution of global significance, its history central to our understanding of the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet one vital piece of its history has never been accessible to anyone beyond a tiny circle of BBC staff and official historians: its internal archive of 632 recorded interviews - with key programme-makers and presenters such as David Attenborough, Sydney Newman, and John Cole, producers of early television such as Cecil Madden and Grace Wyndham Goldie, pioneering engineers, past directors-general, even Home Secretaries. All were interviewed as they retired and encouraged to speak frankly. Their testimonies offer unique 'ringside' accounts of how the BBC has developed the arts of broadcasting and seen the world of politics and culture. Yet, not only are they inaccessible to all but a select few; they are also unusable - scattered, un-catalogued, preserved in multiple formats from videotape to crumbling paper.
BBC CONNECTED HISTORIES brings new digital humanities thinking to bear on this problem. It will digitise these materials to the highest standards and create a digital catalogue of the entire collection. Through generating metadata and tagging each interview, it doesn't just make available individual testimonies; the collection as a whole becomes searchable. Single accounts can be related to one another, themes or events mapped from several angles. Biographies become networked.
By publishing this catalogue as 'linked open data' (LOD), the oral histories (OH) become connected to other digitised resources, including those of our Partners - the Science Museum (incl. the National Media Museum), Mass Observation (MO), and the British Entertainment History Project (BEHP), as well as all the BBC's other collections. So anyone searching for material on, say, 'Mrs Thatcher resigns', 'Diana', 'immigration' or 'comedy' can simultaneously discover relevant passages in the OH collection, the BBC's own vast programme archive, the personal accounts of listeners and viewers in MO, or the interviews of broadcasting technicians in BEHP. Or vice versa. This radically expands the ability of any public or academic researcher to connect different sets of evidence - and different perspectives - on BBC history. It provides programme-makers planning output for the BBC's 2022 Centenary with ready access to important though neglected material.
The project will present highlights from the OH and linked collections on a series of BBC-hosted '100 Voices' websites, each on a broad theme (entertainment, war, national identity, etc.). These act (a) as high-profile shop-windows for research, (b) as public portals through which the OH catalogue and related resources can be searched, and (c) access-points for the public to upload their own recollections via a 'memory-share' facility, thereby 'crowd-sourcing' a new body of data.
25 new oral history interviews with former BBC staff will be filmed. These will be of individuals not included in the official OH, and will cover their whole lives, not just their BBC career. Each will be transcribed and tagged, linking them to existing resources. This demonstrates to the BBC the value of adopting a different (deeper, more connected) practice in future archival work - as will be written into a 'White Paper' to be presented formally to the BBC. This will also set out how the BBC's attempt to build a 'Digital Public Space' of shared resources might be improved through new policies on openness and user-engagement. Four journal articles, co-authored by the project team and the research fellow, will explore other methodological insights - in media history, oral history, and digital humanities.
Finally, the PI, Hendy, is the authorised Centenary historian for the BBC. The new perspectives generated throughout this project will directly inform the monograph single-volume history he publishes in 2022.

BBC CONNECTED HISTORIES is conceived both as a contribution to public understanding of the BBC and as an energising intervention in the 'Digital Public Space' -a concept developed by the BBC that articulates the goal of large-scale open access to national resources. Impact is on 5 fronts:
1. Enriching public understanding of BBC history. The '100 Voices' websites, and their associated links and resources, offer a high profile, accessible shop window for the project's research. The sites not only make viewable in the public realm a set of revelatory recordings; they also supply a rich set of contextual material (programme clips, written documents, timelines, background text) to be explored and enjoyed. They are a gateway to our digital catalogue of the BBC OH collection: users can search catalogue entries, then view any transcripts and films cleared for public use.
2. '100 Voices' will also be designed to encourage the public to actively contribute to BBC history. Online tools such as the BBC's Genome and its navigational aid, Snippets, will encourage playful exploration; a 'memory share' button will provide an opportunity to upload personal testimonies - enabling the public to feel they can shape 'official' BBC history. '100 Voices' will be released in five annual tranches between 2017 and 2021, each accompanied by a public workshop in a high-profile venue. These, targeted especially at local history groups, the retired, heritage organisations, and teachers, will feature talks from broadcasters or project members, and hands-on sessions for discovering more about the BBC through exploring the collections, the catalogue, and in some cases historic objects. They include opportunities for attendees to share - and have recorded for our memory bank - recollections of their own TV viewing and radio listening.
3. Improving professional media awareness and use of archival resources on BBC history. The BBC OH is largely unknown, and so woefully under-used, by anyone making programmes or writing press articles about the BBC. As the BBC's 2022 Centenary approaches, we offer a unique opportunity to rectify this. By providing metadata with searchable and linked content, the project makes the OH a more accessible programme-resource, encouraging more extensive use in future output. We will hold a number of workshops at the BBC, in which selected content, illustrating its documentary significance, is demonstrated to key programme staff and independent production companies. We will do this by 2019 to increase awareness of the resource and the academic expertise behind it before programme commissioning takes place for autumn 2022. Attendees will be introduced to the 'RES', an aggregating platform for linked open data, and encouraged to continue using it as a workplace tool for accessing our data.
4. Increasing the awareness of broadcast-related collections in Science Museum Group (SMG), Mass Observation (MO), and BEHP. Our project showcases highlights from each partner's collections on '100 Voices', and creates cross-searchable linkage between the OH and their own digital catalogues. All our partners see this as a means of drawing greater public attention to the objects, recordings, and documents they hold, and of raising their institutional profiles as resource-centres for popular media history. E.g. SMG notes the opportunity presented by the project to give a greater focus on broadcasting in the National Media Museum's identity.
5. Providing new policy guidance to the BBC. We will submit a 'White Paper' to the Director-General's office, drawing on our experience to set out suggested improvements in its archival practices - guidance on oral history, digitization, tagging and metadata standards, the need for contextual information, and strategies for achieving greater access. This will enable the BBC to make a stronger case internally, to Government, to the media, and to licence-fee payers about its commitment to the Digital Public Space.