FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2019

In 2014, the BBC launched the first version of BBC Genome, a website created by scanning 350,000 editions of the Radio Times magazine and using OCR to extract 5.5m listings of every network television and radio broadcast made between 1923 and 2009, creating the first publically available version of the BBC Archive catalogue. Users were invited to correct errors in the data, and to date over 500,000 corrections have been edited by members of the public and moderated by BBC staff, creating a clean and accurate version of Radio Times data. Since launch, 18,000 full programmes have been linked to the database for users to watch / listen to, and the scans of the actual Radio Times magazines from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s have been made available. Genome has proved to be a much-loved resource for academics, researchers, the public, and BBC staff, and the source of stories on our blog and social media feeds. With the BBC’s centenary approaching in 2022, the team has recently been adding lots more data, filling in some gaps and bringing the listings up-to-date, and is preparing to add millions of pages of historic radio news scripts, offering a vast amount of long-lost information about the stories the BBC broadcast between 1937 and 1997. This presentation will talk about the history and challenges of the project and plans for the future.