The world of digitisation has gone through many changes over the years, owing to inevitable changes in technology and formatting, as well as organisational policies. Particularly in recent years, where the web has offered a medium for access and exposure of materials that have been preserved, a new virtual landscape has opened up for the presentation of archives.
Highlighted in the lecture were a number of reasons for digitising, and of these this essay focuses on the potential for presenting a critical mass of materials, particularly with regard to web access. An issue that museums and archives come across is that people aren’t aware of what is available to them.
This reflection focuses on the benefits and drawbacks of the web as a medium to present archives to the public, using the BBC’s iPlayer as an example. Sutherland highlights how important the internet has become to the BBC, ‘It had taken just five years for the internet to become, at least theoretically, as important to the BBC as the two tenets[1] of broadcasting that had sustained it since its very launch in 1926.’[2]
The numerous broadcast materials that BBC’s archives possess are ever-expanding and physical storage space is an issue. Virtual storage offers an unlimited wealth of space for storing collections, once they’ve been digitised. James Insell, Head of Preservation at the BBC, reiterates this point: ‘Traditionally, archives have been used to dealing with the physical materials. In the future, that isn’t going to be the case. If you’ve got files, you can buy in servers and manage your storage service.’[3]
The internet provides a suitable medium for people to access the wealth of the collection. Web access to digitised materials is fantastic for extending organisations’ reach to wider and new audiences. ‘This permits them to deliver their programmes over a broadband data network at marginal incremental cost... and can also enable efficient streaming of video channels over the open internet’[4], but also to present a much larger volume of materials from their archives. Before archives’ collections were available digitally, individuals had to visit the archive to view the artefact. In the BBC’s case, this would generally be undertaken by researchers for producers of new programmes, and not the public.
For the past few years the BBC have been producing all their programmes in born-digital format, eliminating the need to digitise them. Digitisation projects are often long, when collections are large (the BBC has approximately 2m hours worth of material in their archive), and costly, because in many cases only experts have the ability to carry out the work. There is the need for an experienced project manager to oversee the whole process, to ensure that vision, costs and timings are not obscured by anything throughout the project, but also that a sustainable and feasible future management system follows.
Costs, as were mentioned in the lecture, are a key factor when it comes to a digitisation project, and therefore funding requires careful management. Return-on-investment (hereafter ROI) needs to be clearly visible, but materials need digitising before this is possible. The BBC’s programmes, in this case, are currently available to the public through the medium of the web, through their designed-for-purpose iPlayer, fulfilling their public service requirements, in turn ticking a box for ROI.
The BBC, via the iPlayer, makes all the programmes that are screened available for streaming, or downloading to view, for a period of 7 days after TV / radio broadcast. This is very useful for those people who may not be able to watch their favourite shows / sports broadcasts when they are screened live. It does not, however, account for any programmes that have been made prior to the launch of the iPlayer at the end of 2007, nor does it allow users to find any programme from longer than 7 days ago.
The early success of BBC iPlayer showed averages of:
‘around 1.3 million unique users a week, with as many as 500,000 streams or downloads per day...also boosting traffic figures for BBC.co.uk, according to the corporation, with the website attracting around 20 million UK unique users per week in January, a 29% year-on-year rise.’[5]
This success has been great for the BBC, who had noticed that, ‘The number of adults aged 16-34 watching, for example, news on BBC1 and BBC2 has dropped 12% in five years to 36% of the audience; around 2.5m young adults‘[6], and further the impact the internet could have on future audience figures: ‘the internet, and in particular Web 2.0 sites, offers the BBC a way to counter this and attract younger audiences.’[7]
Ashley Highfield (former head of future media and technology division at the BBC[8]), has the vision that by 2012, ‘all BBC content will be available on any platform at any time to anyone’[9]. However, this is a big vision to live up to:
‘We can only go as fast as we’ve got the money to do so. It’s an expensive business, a small pipe, and we’ve got a vast collection – bearing in mind that a lot may be duplicates and viewing copies, we have 4m items (2m hours).’[10]
The BBC is one of the UK’s, if not the most, prominent broadcaster, and their progress in the digital world has been hugely successful, with one of the most popular websites in the country, and their iPlayer service. If the digitisation of their collections can be completed on schedule, the accessibility and user-focused service will continue to keep them at the forefront of the UK’s, if not the World’s, news, information, and entertainment companies.
[1] ‘free from both political and commercial influence and answers only to its viewers and listeners’ – BBC Royal Charter – (review May 2005)
[2] Sutherland, B., ‘The BBC and its Web 2.0 Partners’, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Digital interactive media in entertainment and arts, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, Vol. 274, 2007
[3] James Insell, Head of Preservation, BBC, Interview 28.02.08
[4] Cooper, W. J., Peering Into The Future Of Digital Media Distribution, informitv, http://www.ibc-show.com/IBC2007/Final%20Papers/Wired%20and%20Wireless%20Technologies/1240%20cooper.pdf, 2007
[5]Sweeny, M., iPlayer tops 17m views since Christmas, The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/feb/20/bbc.digitalmedia1?gusrc=rss&feed=technology, 20.02.08
[6] Sutherland, B., ‘The BBC and its Web 2.0 Partners’, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Digital interactive media in entertainment and arts, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, Vol. 274, 2007
[7] Sutherland, B., ‘The BBC and its Web 2.0 Partners’, Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Digital interactive media in entertainment and arts, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, Vol. 274, 2007
[8] Highfield has now left to join Project Kangaroo, a collaborative group of British broadcasters
[9] James Insell, Head of Preservation, BBC, Interview 28.02.08
[10] James Insell, Head of Preservation, BBC, Interview 28.02.08
